arXiv subjects

Khaled B. Letaief

Publications and source records attributed to Khaled B. Letaief.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Cell-Free Massive MIMO Detection: A Distributed Expectation Propagation Approach

Cell-free massive MIMO is one of the core technologies for future wireless networks. It is expected to bring enormous benefits, including ultra-high reliability, data throughput, energy efficiency, and uniform coverage. As a radically distributed system, the performance of cell-free massive MIMO critically relies on efficient distributed processing algorithms. In this paper, we propose a distributed expectation propagation (EP) detector for cell-free massive MIMO, which consists of two modules: a nonlinear module at the central processing unit (CPU) and a linear module at each access point (AP). The turbo principle in iterative channel decoding is utilized to compute and pass the extrinsic information between the two modules. An analytical framework is provided to characterize the asymptotic performance of the proposed EP detector with a large number of antennas. Furthermore, a distributed iterative channel estimation and data detection (ICD) algorithm is developed to handle the practical setting with imperfect channel state information (CSI). Simulation results will show that the proposed method outperforms existing detectors for cell-free massive MIMO systems in terms of the bit-error rate and demonstrate that the developed theoretical analysis accurately predicts system performance. Finally, it is shown that with imperfect CSI, the proposed ICD algorithm improves the system performance significantly and enables non-orthogonal pilots to reduce the pilot overhead.

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arXiv2023

Hybrid Far- and Near-Field Channel Estimation for THz Ultra-Massive MIMO via Fixed Point Networks

Terahertz ultra-massive multiple-input multiple-output (THz UM-MIMO) is envisioned as one of the key enablers of 6G wireless systems. Due to the joint effect of its array aperture and small wavelength, the near-field region of THz UM-MIMO is greatly enlarged. The high-dimensional channel of such systems thus consists of a stochastic mixture of far and near fields, which renders channel estimation extremely challenging. Previous works based on uni-field assumptions cannot capture the hybrid far- and near-field features, thus suffering significant performance loss. This motivates us to consider hybrid-field channel estimation. We draw inspirations from fixed point theory to develop an efficient deep learning based channel estimator with adaptive complexity and linear convergence guarantee. Built upon classic orthogonal approximate message passing, we transform each iteration into a contractive mapping, comprising a closed-form linear estimator and a neural network based non-linear estimator. A major algorithmic innovation involves applying fixed point iteration to compute the channel estimate while modeling neural networks with arbitrary depth and adapting to the hybrid-field channel conditions. Simulation results verify our theoretical analysis and show significant performance gains over state-of-the-art approaches in the estimation accuracy and convergence rate.

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arXiv2023

Blind Performance Prediction for Deep Learning Based Ultra-Massive MIMO Channel Estimation

Reliability is of paramount importance for the physical layer of wireless systems due to its decisive impact on end-to-end performance. However, the uncertainty of prevailing deep learning (DL)-based physical layer algorithms is hard to quantify due to the black-box nature of neural networks. This limitation is a major obstacle that hinders their practical deployment. In this paper, we attempt to quantify the uncertainty of an important category of DL-based channel estimators. An efficient statistical method is proposed to make blind predictions for the mean squared error of the DL-estimated channel solely based on received pilots, without knowledge of the ground-truth channel, the prior distribution of the channel, or the noise statistics. The complexity of the blind performance prediction is low and scales only linearly with the number of antennas. Simulation results for ultra-massive multiple-input multiple-output (UM-MIMO) channel estimation with a mixture of far-field and near-field paths are provided to verify the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method.

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arXiv2023

GNN-Enhanced Approximate Message Passing for Massive/Ultra-Massive MIMO Detection

Efficient massive/ultra-massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detection algorithms with satisfactory performance and low complexity are critical to meet the high throughput and ultra-low latency requirements in 5G and beyond communications, given the extremely large number of antennas. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity graph neural network (GNN) enhanced approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm, AMP-GNN, for massive/ultra-massive MIMO detection. The structure of the neural network is customized by unfolding the AMP algorithm and introducing the GNN module for multiuser interference cancellation. Numerical results will show that the proposed AMP-GNN significantly improves the performance of the AMP detector and achieves comparable performance as the state-of-the-art deep learning-based MIMO detectors but with reduced computational complexity. Furthermore, it presents strong robustness to the change of the number of users.

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arXiv2023

Hierarchical Federated Learning with Quantization: Convergence Analysis and System Design

Federated learning (FL) is a powerful distributed machine learning framework where a server aggregates models trained by different clients without accessing their private data. Hierarchical FL, with a client-edge-cloud aggregation hierarchy, can effectively leverage both the cloud server's access to many clients' data and the edge servers' closeness to the clients to achieve a high communication efficiency. Neural network quantization can further reduce the communication overhead during model uploading. To fully exploit the advantages of hierarchical FL, an accurate convergence analysis with respect to the key system parameters is needed. Unfortunately, existing analysis is loose and does not consider model quantization. In this paper, we derive a tighter convergence bound for hierarchical FL with quantization. The convergence result leads to practical guidelines for important design problems such as the client-edge aggregation and edge-client association strategies. Based on the obtained analytical results, we optimize the two aggregation intervals and show that the client-edge aggregation interval should slowly decay while the edge-cloud aggregation interval needs to adapt to the ratio of the client-edge and edge-cloud propagation delay. Simulation results shall verify the design guidelines and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed aggregation strategy.

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arXiv2022

Why Shape Coding? Asymptotic Analysis of the Entropy Rate for Digital Images

This paper focuses on the ultimate limit theory of image compression. It proves that for an image source, there exists a coding method with shapes that can achieve the entropy rate under a certain condition where the shape-pixel ratio in the encoder/decoder is $O({1 \over {\log t}})$. Based on the new finding, an image coding framework with shapes is proposed and proved to be asymptotically optimal for stationary and ergodic processes. Moreover, the condition $O({1 \over {\log t}})$ of shape-pixel ratio in the encoder/decoder has been confirmed in the image database MNIST, which illustrates the soft compression with shape coding is a near-optimal scheme for lossless compression of images.

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arXiv2022

Graph Neural Networks for Wireless Communications: From Theory to Practice

Deep learning-based approaches have been developed to solve challenging problems in wireless communications, leading to promising results. Early attempts adopted neural network architectures inherited from applications such as computer vision. They often yield poor performance in large scale networks (i.e., poor scalability) and unseen network settings (i.e., poor generalization). To resolve these issues, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been recently adopted, as they can effectively exploit the domain knowledge, i.e., the graph topology in wireless communications problems. GNN-based methods can achieve near-optimal performance in large-scale networks and generalize well under different system settings, but the theoretical underpinnings and design guidelines remain elusive, which may hinder their practical implementations. This paper endeavors to fill both the theoretical and practical gaps. For theoretical guarantees, we prove that GNNs achieve near-optimal performance in wireless networks with much fewer training samples than traditional neural architectures. Specifically, to solve an optimization problem on an $n$-node graph (where the nodes may represent users, base stations, or antennas), GNNs' generalization error and required number of training samples are $\mathcal{O}(n)$ and $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ times lower than the unstructured multi-layer perceptrons. For design guidelines, we propose a unified framework that is applicable to general design problems in wireless networks, which includes graph modeling, neural architecture design, and theory-guided performance enhancement. Extensive simulations, which cover a variety of important problems and network settings, verify our theory and the effectiveness of the proposed design framework.

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arXiv2022

Deep Learning-Enabled Semantic Communication Systems with Task-Unaware Transmitter and Dynamic Data

Existing deep learning-enabled semantic communication systems often rely on shared background knowledge between the transmitter and receiver that includes empirical data and their associated semantic information. In practice, the semantic information is defined by the pragmatic task of the receiver and cannot be known to the transmitter. The actual observable data at the transmitter can also have non-identical distribution with the empirical data in the shared background knowledge library. To address these practical issues, this paper proposes a new neural network-based semantic communication system for image transmission, where the task is unaware at the transmitter and the data environment is dynamic. The system consists of two main parts, namely the semantic coding (SC) network and the data adaptation (DA) network. The SC network learns how to extract and transmit the semantic information using a receiver-leading training process. By using the domain adaptation technique from transfer learning, the DA network learns how to convert the data observed into a similar form of the empirical data that the SC network can process without retraining. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method can be adaptive to observable datasets while keeping high performance in terms of both data recovery and task execution.

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arXiv2022

Augmented Deep Unfolding for Downlink Beamforming in Multi-cell Massive MIMO With Limited Feedback

In limited feedback multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) cellular networks, users send quantized information about the channel conditions to the associated base station (BS) for downlink beamforming. However, channel quantization and beamforming have been treated as two separate tasks conventionally, which makes it difficult to achieve global system optimality. In this paper, we propose an augmented deep unfolding (ADU) approach that jointly optimizes the beamforming scheme at the BSs and the channel quantization scheme at the users. In particular, the classic WMMSE beamformer is unrolled and a deep neural network (DNN) is leveraged to pre-process its input to enhance the performance. The variational information bottleneck technique is adopted to further improve the performance when the feedback capacity is strictly restricted. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed ADU method outperforms all the benchmark schemes in terms of the system average rate.

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arXiv2022

Collaborative Sensing in Perceptive Mobile Networks: Opportunities and Challenges

With the development of innovative applications that demand accurate environment information, e.g., autonomous driving, sensing becomes an important requirement for future wireless networks. To this end, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) provides a promising platform to exploit the synergy between sensing and communication, where perceptive mobile networks (PMNs) were proposed to add accurate sensing capability to existing wireless networks. The well-developed cellular networks offer exciting opportunities for sensing, including large coverage, strong computation and communication power, and most importantly networked sensing, where the perspectives from multiple sensing nodes can be collaboratively utilized for sensing the same target. However, PMNs also face big challenges such as the inherent interference between sensing and communication, the complex sensing environment, and the tracking of high-speed targets by cellular networks. This paper provides a comprehensive review on the design of PMNs, covering the popular network architectures, sensing protocols, standing research problems, and available solutions. Several future research directions that are critical for the development of PMNs are also discussed.

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arXiv2022

Perceptive Mobile Network with Distributed Target Monitoring Terminals: Leaking Communication Energy for Sensing

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) creates a platform to exploit the synergy between two powerful functionalities that have been developing separately. However, the interference management and resource allocation between sensing and communication have not been fully studied. In this paper, we consider the design of perceptive mobile networks (PMNs) by adding sensing capability to current cellular networks. To avoid the full-duplex operation, we propose the PMN with distributed target monitoring terminals (TMTs) where passive TMTs are deployed over wireless networks to locate the sensing target (ST). We jointly optimize the transmit and receive beamformers towards the communication user terminals (UEs) and the ST by alternating-optimization (AO) and prove its convergence. To reduce computation complexity and obtain physical insights, we further investigate the use of linear transceivers, including zero forcing and beam synthesis (B-syn). Our analysis revealed interesting physical insights regarding interference management and resource allocation between sensing and communication: 1) instead of forming dedicated sensing signals, it is more efficient to redesign the communication signals for both communication and sensing purposes and "leak" communication energy for sensing; 2) the amount of energy leakage from one UE to the ST depends on their relative locations.

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arXiv2022

How Neural Architectures Affect Deep Learning for Communication Networks?

In recent years, there has been a surge in applying deep learning to various challenging design problems in communication networks. The early attempts adopt neural architectures inherited from applications such as computer vision, which suffer from poor generalization, scalability, and lack of interpretability. To tackle these issues, domain knowledge has been integrated into the neural architecture design, which achieves near-optimal performance in large-scale networks and generalizes well under different system settings. This paper endeavors to theoretically validate the importance and effects of neural architectures when applying deep learning to design communication networks. We prove that by exploiting permutation invariance, a common property in communication networks, graph neural networks (GNNs) converge faster and generalize better than fully connected multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), especially when the number of nodes (e.g., users, base stations, or antennas) is large. Specifically, we prove that under common assumptions, for a communication network with $n$ nodes, GNNs converge $O(n \log n)$ times faster and their generalization error is $O(n)$ times lower, compared with MLPs.

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arXiv2022

Communication-Efficient Federated Distillation with Active Data Sampling

Federated learning (FL) is a promising paradigm to enable privacy-preserving deep learning from distributed data. Most previous works are based on federated average (FedAvg), which, however, faces several critical issues, including a high communication overhead and the difficulty in dealing with heterogeneous model architectures. Federated Distillation (FD) is a recently proposed alternative to enable communication-efficient and robust FL, which achieves orders of magnitude reduction of the communication overhead compared with FedAvg and is flexible to handle heterogeneous models at the clients. However, so far there is no unified algorithmic framework or theoretical analysis for FD-based methods. In this paper, we first present a generic meta-algorithm for FD and investigate the influence of key parameters through empirical experiments. Then, we verify the empirical observations theoretically. Based on the empirical results and theory, we propose a communication-efficient FD algorithm with active data sampling to improve the model performance and reduce the communication overhead. Empirical simulations on benchmark datasets will demonstrate that our proposed algorithm effectively and significantly reduces the communication overhead while achieving a satisfactory performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Semantic Communication Meets Edge Intelligence

The development of emerging applications, such as autonomous transportation systems, are expected to result in an explosive growth in mobile data traffic. As the available spectrum resource becomes more and more scarce, there is a growing need for a paradigm shift from Shannon's Classical Information Theory (CIT) to semantic communication (SemCom). Specifically, the former adopts a "transmit-before-understanding" approach while the latter leverages artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to "understand-before-transmit", thereby alleviating bandwidth pressure by reducing the amount of data to be exchanged without negating the semantic effectiveness of the transmitted symbols. However, the semantic extraction (SE) procedure incurs costly computation and storage overheads. In this article, we introduce an edge-driven training, maintenance, and execution of SE. We further investigate how edge intelligence can be enhanced with SemCom through improving the generalization capabilities of intelligent agents at lower computation overheads and reducing the communication overhead of information exchange. Finally, we present a case study involving semantic-aware resource optimization for the wireless powered Internet of Things (IoT).

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arXiv2021

IRS-aided MIMO Systems over Double-scattering Channels: Impact of Channel Rank Deficiency

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are promising enablers for next-generation wireless communications due to their reconfigurability and high energy efficiency in improving poor propagation condition of channels, e.g., limited scattering environment. However, most existing works assumed full-rank channels requiring rich scatters, which may not be available in practice. To analyze the impact of rank-deficient channels and mitigate the ensued performance loss, we consider a large-scale IRS-aided MIMO system with statistical channel state information (CSI), where the double-scattering channel is adopted to model rank deficiency. By leveraging random matrix theory (RMT), we first derive a deterministic approximation (DA) of the ergodic rate with low computational complexity and prove the existence and uniqueness of the DA parameters. Then, we propose an alternating optimization algorithm for maximizing the DA with respect to phase shifts and signal covariance matrices. Numerical results will show that the DA is tight and our proposed method can effectively mitigate the performance loss induced by channel rank deficiency.

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arXiv2021

Task-Oriented Multi-User Semantic Communications

While semantic communications have shown the potential in the case of single-modal single-users, its applications to the multi-user scenario remain limited. In this paper, we investigate deep learning (DL) based multi-user semantic communication systems for transmitting single-modal data and multimodal data, respectively. We will adopt three intelligent tasks, including, image retrieval, machine translation, and visual question answering (VQA) as the transmission goal of semantic communication systems. We will then propose a Transformer based unique framework to unify the structure of transmitters for different tasks. For the single-modal multi-user system, we will propose two Transformer based models, named, DeepSC-IR and DeepSC-MT, to perform image retrieval and machine translation, respectively. In this case, DeepSC-IR is trained to optimize the distance in embedding space between images and DeepSC-MT is trained to minimize the semantic errors by recovering the semantic meaning of sentences. For the multimodal multi-user system, we develop a Transformer enabled model, named, DeepSC-VQA, for the VQA task by extracting text-image information at the transmitters and fusing it at the receiver. In particular, a novel layer-wise Transformer is designed to help fuse multimodal data by adding connection between each of the encoder and decoder layers. Numerical results will show that the proposed models are superior to traditional communications in terms of the robustness to channels, computational complexity, transmission delay, and the task-execution performance at various task-specific metrics.

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arXiv2021

How global observation works in Federated Learning: Integrating vertical training into Horizontal Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has recently emerged as a transformative paradigm that jointly train a model with distributed data sets in IoT while avoiding the need for central data collection. Due to the limited observation range, such data sets can only reflect local information, which limits the quality of trained models. In practice, the global information and local observations would require a joint consideration for learning to make a reasonable policy. However, in horizontal FL, the central agency only acts as a model aggregator without utilizing its global observation to further improve the model. This could significantly degrade the performance in some missions such as traffic flow prediction in network systems, where the global information may enhance the accuracy. Meanwhile, the global feature may not be directly transmitted to agents for data security. How to utilize the global observation residing in the central agency while protecting its safety thus rises up as an important problem in FL. In this paper, we develop a vertical-horizontal federated learning (VHFL) process, where the global feature is shared with the agents in a procedure similar to that of vertical FL without any extra communication rounds. By considering the delay and packet loss, we will analyze VHFL convergence and validate its performance by experiments. It is shown that the proposed VHFL could enhance the accuracy compared with horizontal FL while still protecting the security of global data.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Cell-Free Massive MIMO for 6G Wireless Communication Networks

The recently commercialized fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication networks achieved many improvements, including air interface enhancement, spectrum expansion, and network intensification by several key technologies, such as massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), millimeter-wave communications, and ultra-dense networking. Despite the deployment of 5G commercial systems, wireless communications is still facing many challenges to enable connected intelligence and a myriad of applications such as industrial Internet-of-things, autonomous systems, brain-computer interfaces, digital twin, tactile Internet, etc. Therefore, it is urgent to start research on the sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication systems. Among the candidate technologies for such systems, cell-free massive MIMO which combines the advantages of distributed systems and massive MIMO is considered as a key solution to enhance the wireless transmission efficiency and becomes the international frontier. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on cell-free massive MIMO for 6G wireless communication networks, especially from the signal processing perspective. We focus on enabling physical layer technologies for cell-free massive MIMO, such as user association, pilot assignment, transmitter and receiver design, as well as power control and allocation. Furthermore, some current and future research problems are highlighted.

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