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Khaled B. Letaief

Publications and source records attributed to Khaled B. Letaief.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

Deep Learning-Based Adaptive Joint Source-Channel Coding using Hypernetworks

Deep learning-based joint source-channel coding (DJSCC) is expected to be a key technique for {the} next-generation wireless networks. However, the existing DJSCC schemes still face the challenge of channel adaptability as they are typically trained under specific channel conditions. In this paper, we propose a generic framework for channel-adaptive DJSCC by utilizing hypernetworks. To tailor the hypernetwork-based framework for communication systems, we propose a memory-efficient hypernetwork parameterization and then develop a channel-adaptive DJSCC network, named Hyper-AJSCC. Compared with existing adaptive DJSCC based on the attention mechanism, Hyper-AJSCC introduces much fewer parameters and can be seamlessly combined with various existing DJSCC networks without any substantial modifications to their neural network architecture. Extensive experiments demonstrate the better adaptability to channel conditions and higher memory efficiency of Hyper-AJSCC compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

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FedNC: A Secure and Efficient Federated Learning Method with Network Coding

Federated Learning (FL) is a promising distributed learning mechanism which still faces two major challenges, namely privacy breaches and system efficiency. In this work, we reconceptualize the FL system from the perspective of network information theory, and formulate an original FL communication framework, FedNC, which is inspired by Network Coding (NC). The main idea of FedNC is mixing the information of the local models by making random linear combinations of the original parameters, before uploading for further aggregation. Due to the benefits of the coding scheme, both theoretical and experimental analysis indicate that FedNC improves the performance of traditional FL in several important ways, including security, efficiency, and robustness. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first framework where NC is introduced in FL. As FL continues to evolve within practical network frameworks, more variants can be further designed based on FedNC.

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A Tutorial on Extremely Large-Scale MIMO for 6G: Fundamentals, Signal Processing, and Applications

Extremely large-scale multiple-input-multiple-output (XL-MIMO), which offers vast spatial degrees of freedom, has emerged as a potentially pivotal enabling technology for the sixth generation (6G) of wireless mobile networks. With its growing significance, both opportunities and challenges are concurrently manifesting. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of research on XL-MIMO wireless systems. In particular, we introduce four XL-MIMO hardware architectures: uniform linear array (ULA)-based XL-MIMO, uniform planar array (UPA)-based XL-MIMO utilizing either patch antennas or point antennas, and continuous aperture (CAP)-based XL-MIMO. We comprehensively analyze and discuss their characteristics and interrelationships. Following this, we introduce several electromagnetic characteristics and general distance boundaries in XL-MIMO. Given the distinct electromagnetic properties of near-field communications, we present a range of channel models to demonstrate the benefits of XL-MIMO. We further discuss and summarize signal processing schemes for XL-MIMO. It is worth noting that the low-complexity signal processing schemes and deep learning empowered signal processing schemes are reviewed and highlighted to promote the practical implementation of XL-MIMO. Furthermore, we explore the interplay between XL-MIMO and other emergent 6G technologies. Finally, we outline several compelling research directions for future XL-MIMO wireless communication systems.

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Large Language Models Empowered Autonomous Edge AI for Connected Intelligence

The evolution of wireless networks gravitates towards connected intelligence, a concept that envisions seamless interconnectivity among humans, objects, and intelligence in a hyper-connected cyber-physical world. Edge artificial intelligence (Edge AI) is a promising solution to achieve connected intelligence by delivering high-quality, low-latency, and privacy-preserving AI services at the network edge. This article presents a vision of autonomous edge AI systems that automatically organize, adapt, and optimize themselves to meet users' diverse requirements, leveraging the power of large language models (LLMs), i.e., Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT). By exploiting the powerful abilities of GPT in language understanding, planning, and code generation, as well as incorporating classic wisdom such as task-oriented communication and edge federated learning, we present a versatile framework that efficiently coordinates edge AI models to cater to users' personal demands while automatically generating code to train new models in a privacy-preserving manner. Experimental results demonstrate the system's remarkable ability to accurately comprehend user demands, efficiently execute AI models with minimal cost, and effectively create high-performance AI models at edge servers.

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Generative AI for Physical Layer Communications: A Survey

The recent evolution of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) leads to the emergence of groundbreaking applications such as ChatGPT, which not only enhances the efficiency of digital content production, such as text, audio, video, or even network traffic data, but also enriches its diversity. Beyond digital content creation, GAI's capability in analyzing complex data distributions offers great potential for wireless communications, particularly amidst a rapid expansion of new physical layer communication technologies. For example, the diffusion model can learn input signal distributions and use them to improve the channel estimation accuracy, while the variational autoencoder can model channel distribution and infer latent variables for blind channel equalization. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive investigation of GAI's applications for communications at the physical layer, ranging from traditional issues, including signal classification, channel estimation, and equalization, to emerging topics, such as intelligent reflecting surfaces and joint source channel coding. We also compare GAI-enabled physical layer communications with those supported by traditional AI, highlighting GAI's inherent capabilities and unique contributions in these areas. Finally, the paper discusses open issues and proposes several future research directions, laying a foundation for further exploration and advancement of GAI in physical layer communications.

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Learning Channel Capacity with Neural Mutual Information Estimator Based on Message Importance Measure

Channel capacity estimation plays a crucial role in beyond 5G intelligent communications. Despite its significance, this task is challenging for a majority of channels, especially for the complex channels not modeled as the well-known typical ones. Recently, neural networks have been used in mutual information estimation and optimization. They are particularly considered as efficient tools for learning channel capacity. In this paper, we propose a cooperative framework to simultaneously estimate channel capacity and design the optimal codebook. First, we will leverage MIM-based GAN, a novel form of generative adversarial network (GAN) using message importance measure (MIM) as the information distance, into mutual information estimation, and develop a novel method, named MIM-based mutual information estimator (MMIE). Then, we design a generalized cooperative framework for channel capacity learning, in which a generator is regarded as an encoder producing the channel input, while a discriminator is the mutual information estimator that assesses the performance of the generator. Through the adversarial training, the generator automatically learns the optimal codebook and the discriminator estimates the channel capacity. Numerical experiments will demonstrate that compared with several conventional estimators, the MMIE achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and stability.

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URLLC-Awared Resource Allocation for Heterogeneous Vehicular Edge Computing

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) is a promising technology to support real-time vehicular applications, where vehicles offload intensive computation tasks to the nearby VEC server for processing. However, the traditional VEC that relies on single communication technology cannot well meet the communication requirement for task offloading, thus the heterogeneous VEC integrating the advantages of dedicated short-range communications (DSRC), millimeter-wave (mmWave) and cellular-based vehicle to infrastructure (C-V2I) is introduced to enhance the communication capacity. The communication resource allocation and computation resource allocation may significantly impact on the ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) performance and the VEC system utility, in this case, how to do the resource allocations is becoming necessary. In this paper, we consider a heterogeneous VEC with multiple communication technologies and various types of tasks, and propose an effective resource allocation policy to minimize the system utility while satisfying the URLLC requirement. We first formulate an optimization problem to minimize the system utility under the URLLC constraint which modeled by the moment generating function (MGF)-based stochastic network calculus (SNC), then we present a Lyapunov-guided deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method to convert and solve the optimization problem. Extensive simulation experiments illustrate that the proposed resource allocation approach is effective.

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Flexible-Position MIMO for Wireless Communications: Fundamentals, Challenges, and Future Directions

The flexible-position multiple-input multiple-output (FLP-MIMO), such as fluid antennas and movable antennas, is a promising technology for future wireless communications. This is due to the fact that the positions of antennas at the transceiver and reflector can be dynamically optimized to achieve better channel conditions and, as such, can provide high spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) gains with fewer antennas. In this article, we introduce the fundamentals of FLP-MIMO systems, including hardware design, structure design, and potential applications. We shall demonstrate that FLP-MIMO, using fewer flexible antennas, can match the channel hardening achieved by a large number of fixed antennas. We will then analyze the SE-EE relationship for FLP-MIMO and fixed-position MIMO. Furthermore, we will design the optimal trajectory of flexible antennas to maximize system sum SE or total EE at a fixed travel distance of each antenna. Finally, several important research directions regarding FLP-MIMO communications are presented to facilitate further investigation.

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Message Passing Meets Graph Neural Networks: A New Paradigm for Massive MIMO Systems

As one of the core technologies for 5G systems, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) introduces dramatic capacity improvements along with very high beamforming and spatial multiplexing gains. When developing efficient physical layer algorithms for massive MIMO systems, message passing is one promising candidate owing to the superior performance. However, as their computational complexity increases dramatically with the problem size, the state-of-the-art message passing algorithms cannot be directly applied to future 6G systems, where an exceedingly large number of antennas are expected to be deployed. To address this issue, we propose a model-driven deep learning (DL) framework, namely the AMP-GNN for massive MIMO transceiver design, by considering the low complexity of the AMP algorithm and adaptability of GNNs. Specifically, the structure of the AMP-GNN network is customized by unfolding the approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm and introducing a graph neural network (GNN) module into it. The permutation equivariance property of AMP-GNN is proved, which enables the AMP-GNN to learn more efficiently and to adapt to different numbers of users. We also reveal the underlying reason why GNNs improve the AMP algorithm from the perspective of expectation propagation, which motivates us to amalgamate various GNNs with different message passing algorithms. In the simulation, we take the massive MIMO detection to exemplify that the proposed AMP-GNN significantly improves the performance of the AMP detector, achieves comparable performance as the state-of-the-art DL-based MIMO detectors, and presents strong robustness to various mismatches.

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Over-the-Air Federated Learning and Optimization

Federated learning (FL), as an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm, allows a mass of edge devices to collaboratively train a global model while preserving privacy. In this tutorial, we focus on FL via over-the-air computation (AirComp), which is proposed to reduce the communication overhead for FL over wireless networks at the cost of compromising in the learning performance due to model aggregation error arising from channel fading and noise. We first provide a comprehensive study on the convergence of AirComp-based FedAvg (AirFedAvg) algorithms under both strongly convex and non-convex settings with constant and diminishing learning rates in the presence of data heterogeneity. Through convergence and asymptotic analysis, we characterize the impact of aggregation error on the convergence bound and provide insights for system design with convergence guarantees. Then we derive convergence rates for AirFedAvg algorithms for strongly convex and non-convex objectives. For different types of local updates that can be transmitted by edge devices (i.e., local model, gradient, and model difference), we reveal that transmitting local model in AirFedAvg may cause divergence in the training procedure. In addition, we consider more practical signal processing schemes to improve the communication efficiency and further extend the convergence analysis to different forms of model aggregation error caused by these signal processing schemes. Extensive simulation results under different settings of objective functions, transmitted local information, and communication schemes verify the theoretical conclusions.

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Delay-sensitive Task Offloading in Vehicular Fog Computing-Assisted Platoons

Vehicles in platoons need to process many tasks to support various real-time vehicular applications. When a task arrives at a vehicle, the vehicle may not process the task due to its limited computation resource. In this case, it usually requests to offload the task to other vehicles in the platoon for processing. However, when the computation resources of all the vehicles in the platoon are insufficient, the task cannot be processed in time through offloading to the other vehicles in the platoon. Vehicular fog computing (VFC)-assisted platoon can solve this problem through offloading the task to the VFC which is formed by the vehicles driving near the platoon. Offloading delay is an important performance metric, which is impacted by both the offloading strategy for deciding where the task is offloaded and the number of the allocated vehicles in VFC to process the task. Thus, it is critical to propose an offloading strategy to minimize the offloading delay. In the VFC-assisted platoon system, vehicles usually adopt the IEEE 802.11p distributed coordination function (DCF) mechanism while having various computation resources. Moreover, when vehicles arrive and depart the VFC randomly, their tasks also arrive at and depart the system randomly. In this paper, we propose a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP) based offloading strategy while considering these factors to obtain the maximal long-term reward reflecting the offloading delay. Our research provides a robust strategy for task offloading in VFC systems, its effectiveness is demonstrated through simulation experiments and comparison with benchmark strategies.

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Binary Federated Learning with Client-Level Differential Privacy

Federated learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving collaborative learning framework, and differential privacy can be applied to further enhance its privacy protection. Existing FL systems typically adopt Federated Average (FedAvg) as the training algorithm and implement differential privacy with a Gaussian mechanism. However, the inherent privacy-utility trade-off in these systems severely degrades the training performance if a tight privacy budget is enforced. Besides, the Gaussian mechanism requires model weights to be of high-precision. To improve communication efficiency and achieve a better privacy-utility trade-off, we propose a communication-efficient FL training algorithm with differential privacy guarantee. Specifically, we propose to adopt binary neural networks (BNNs) and introduce discrete noise in the FL setting. Binary model parameters are uploaded for higher communication efficiency and discrete noise is added to achieve the client-level differential privacy protection. The achieved performance guarantee is rigorously proved, and it is shown to depend on the level of discrete noise. Experimental results based on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets will demonstrate that the proposed training algorithm achieves client-level privacy protection with performance gain while enjoying the benefits of low communication overhead from binary model updates.

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Mobile Cell-Free Massive MIMO: Challenges, Solutions, and Future Directions

Cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, which exploit many geographically distributed access points to coherently serve user equipments via spatial multiplexing on the same time-frequency resource, has become a vital component of the next-generation mobile communication networks. Theoretically, CF massive MIMO systems have many advantages, such as large capacity, great coverage, and high reliability, but several obstacles must be overcome. In this article, we study the paradigm of CF massive MIMO-aided mobile communications, including the main application scenarios and associated deployment architectures. Furthermore, we thoroughly investigate the challenges of CF massive MIMO-aided mobile communications. We then exploit a novel predictor antenna, hierarchical cancellation, rate-splitting and dynamic clustering system for CF massive MIMO. Finally, several important research directions regarding CF massive MIMO for mobile communications are presented to facilitate further investigation.

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An Adaptive and Robust Deep Learning Framework for THz Ultra-Massive MIMO Channel Estimation

Terahertz ultra-massive MIMO (THz UM-MIMO) is envisioned as one of the key enablers of 6G wireless networks, for which channel estimation is highly challenging. Traditional analytical estimation methods are no longer effective, as the enlarged array aperture and the small wavelength result in a mixture of far-field and near-field paths, constituting a hybrid-field channel. Deep learning (DL)-based methods, despite the competitive performance, generally lack theoretical guarantees and scale poorly with the size of the array. In this paper, we propose a general DL framework for THz UM-MIMO channel estimation, which leverages existing iterative channel estimators and is with provable guarantees. Each iteration is implemented by a fixed point network (FPN), consisting of a closed-form linear estimator and a DL-based non-linear estimator. The proposed method perfectly matches the THz UM-MIMO channel estimation due to several unique advantages. First, the complexity is low and adaptive. It enjoys provable linear convergence with a low per-iteration cost and monotonically increasing accuracy, which enables an adaptive accuracy-complexity tradeoff. Second, it is robust to practical distribution shifts and can directly generalize to a variety of heavily out-of-distribution scenarios with almost no performance loss, which is suitable for the complicated THz channel conditions. For practical usage, the proposed framework is further extended to wideband THz UM-MIMO systems with beam squint effect. Theoretical analysis and extensive simulation results are provided to illustrate the advantages over the state-of-the-art methods in estimation accuracy, convergence rate, complexity, and robustness.

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Lightweight and Flexible Deep Equilibrium Learning for CSI Feedback in FDD Massive MIMO

In frequency-division duplexing (FDD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, downlink channel state information (CSI) needs to be sent back to the base station (BS) by the users, which causes prohibitive feedback overhead. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and flexible deep learning-based CSI feedback approach by capitalizing on deep equilibrium models. Different from existing deep learning-based methods that stack multiple explicit layers, we propose an implicit equilibrium block to mimic the behavior of an infinite-depth neural network. In particular, the implicit equilibrium block is defined by a fixed-point iteration and the trainable parameters in different iterations are shared, which results in a lightweight model. Furthermore, the number of forward iterations can be adjusted according to users' computation capability, enabling a flexible accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Simulation results will show that the proposed design obtains a comparable performance as the benchmarks but with much-reduced complexity and permits an accuracy-efficiency trade-off at runtime.

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Networked Sensing with AI-Empowered Interference Management: Exploiting Macro-Diversity and Array Gain in Perceptive Mobile Networks

Sensing will be an important service of future wireless networks to assist innovative applications such as autonomous driving and environment monitoring. Perceptive mobile networks (PMNs) were proposed to add sensing capability to current cellular networks. Different from traditional radar, the cellular structure of PMNs offers multiple perspectives to sense the same target, but the inherent interference between sensing and communication along with the joint processing among distributed sensing nodes (SNs) also cause big challenges for the design of PMNs. In this paper, we first propose a two-stage protocol to tackle the interference between two sub-systems. Specifically, the echoes created by communication signals, i.e., interference for sensing, are first estimated in the clutter estimation (CE) stage and then utilized for interference management in the target sensing (TS) stage. A networked sensing detector is then derived to exploit the perspectives provided by multiple SNs for sensing the same target. The macro-diversity from multiple SNs together with the array gain and the higher angular resolution from multiple receive antennas of each SN are investigated to reveal the benefit of networked sensing. Furthermore, we derive the sufficient condition to guarantee one SN's contribution is positive, based on which a SN selection algorithm is proposed. To reduce the communication workload, we propose a distributed model-driven deep-learning algorithm that utilizes partially-sampled data for CE. Simulation results confirm the benefits of networked sensing and validate the higher efficiency of the proposed CE algorithm than existing methods.

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Task-Oriented Communications for 6G: Vision, Principles, and Technologies

Driven by the interplay among artificial intelligence, digital twin, and wireless networks, 6G is envisaged to go beyond data-centric services to provide intelligent and immersive experiences. To efficiently support intelligent tasks with customized service requirements, it becomes critical to develop novel information compression and transmission technologies, which typically involve coupled sensing, communication, and computation processes. To this end, task-oriented communication stands out as a disruptive technology for 6G system design by exploiting the task-specific information structures and folding the communication goals into the design of task-level transmission strategies. In this article, by developing task-oriented information extraction and network resource orchestration strategies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of task-oriented communication principles for typical intelligent tasks, including federated learning, edge inference, and semantic communication.

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FedLP: Layer-wise Pruning Mechanism for Communication-Computation Efficient Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has prevailed as an efficient and privacy-preserved scheme for distributed learning. In this work, we mainly focus on the optimization of computation and communication in FL from a view of pruning. By adopting layer-wise pruning in local training and federated updating, we formulate an explicit FL pruning framework, FedLP (Federated Layer-wise Pruning), which is model-agnostic and universal for different types of deep learning models. Two specific schemes of FedLP are designed for scenarios with homogeneous local models and heterogeneous ones. Both theoretical and experimental evaluations are developed to verify that FedLP relieves the system bottlenecks of communication and computation with marginal performance decay. To the best of our knowledge, FedLP is the first framework that formally introduces the layer-wise pruning into FL. Within the scope of federated learning, more variants and combinations can be further designed based on FedLP.

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