arXiv subjects

Mérouane Debbah

Publications and source records attributed to Mérouane Debbah.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Edge-Native Intelligence for 6G Communications Driven by Federated Learning: A Survey of Trends and Challenges

New technological advancements in wireless networks have enlarged the number of connected devices. The unprecedented surge of data volume in wireless systems empowered by artificial intelligence (AI) opens up new horizons for providing ubiquitous data-driven intelligent services. Traditional cloudcentric machine learning (ML)-based services are implemented by centrally collecting datasets and training models. However, this conventional training technique encompasses two challenges: (i) high communication and energy cost and (ii) threatened data privacy. In this article, we introduce a comprehensive survey of the fundamentals and enabling technologies of federated learning (FL), a newly emerging technique coined to bring ML to the edge of wireless networks. Moreover, an extensive study is presented detailing various applications of FL in wireless networks and highlighting their challenges and limitations. The efficacy of FL is further explored with emerging prospective beyond fifth-generation (B5G) and sixth-generation (6G) communication systems. This survey aims to provide an overview of the state-ofthe-art FL applications in key wireless technologies that will serve as a foundation to establish a firm understanding of the topic. Lastly, we offer a road forward for future research directions.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

Uplink Precoding Design for Cell-Free Massive MIMO with Iteratively Weighted MMSE

In this paper, we investigate a cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output system with both access points and user equipments equipped with multiple antennas over the Weichselberger Rayleigh fading channel. We study the uplink spectral efficiency (SE) for the fully centralized processing scheme and large-scale fading decoding (LSFD) scheme. To further improve the SE performance, we design the uplink precoding schemes based on the weighted sum SE maximization. Since the weighted sum SE maximization problem is not jointly over all optimization variables, two efficient uplink precoding schemes based on Iteratively Weighted sum-Minimum Mean Square Error (I-WMMSE) algorithms, which rely on the iterative minimization of weighted MSE, are proposed for two processing schemes investigated. Furthermore, with maximum ratio combining applied in the LSFD scheme, we derive novel closed-form achievable SE expressions and optimal precoding schemes. Numerical results validate the proposed results and show that the I-WMMSE precoding schemes can achieve excellent sum SE performance with a large number of UE antennas.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

A High-Level Comparison of Recent Technologies for Massive MIMO Architectures

Since the introduction of massive MIMO (mMIMO), the design of a transceiver with feasible complexity has been a challenging problem. Initially, it was believed that the main issue in this respect is the overall RF-cost. However, as mMIMO is becoming more and more a key technology for future wireless networks, it is realized, that the RF-cost is only one of many implementational challenges and design trade-offs. In this paper, we present, analyze and compare various novel mMIMO architectures, considering recent emerging technologies such as intelligent surface-assisted and Rotman lens based architectures. These are compared to the conventional fully digital (FD) and hybrid analog-digital beamforming (HADB) approaches. To enable a fair comparison, we account for various hardware imperfections and losses and utilize a novel, universal algorithm for signal precoding. Based on our thorough investigations, we draw a generic efficiency to quality trade-off for various mMIMO architectures. We find that in a typical cellular communication setting the reflect/transmit array based architectures sketch the best overall trade-off. Further, we show that in a qualitative ranking the power efficiency of the considered architectures is independent of the frequency range.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Extra DoF of Near-Field Holographic MIMOCommunications Leveraging Evanescent Waves

In this letter, we consider transceivers with spatially-constrained antenna apertures of rectangular symmetry, and aim to improve of spatial degrees of freedom (DoF) and channel capacity leveraging evanescent waves for information transmission in near-field scenarios based on the Fourier plane-wave series expansion. The treatment is limited to an isotropic scattering environment but can be extended to the non-isotropic case through the linear-system theoretic interpretation of plane-wave propagation. Numerical results show that evanescent waves have the significant potential to provide additional DoF and capacity in the near-field region.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces and Capacity Optimization: A Large System Analysis

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs), comprising large numbers of low-cost and almost passive metamaterials with tunable reflection properties, have been recently proposed as an enabling technology for programmable wireless propagation environments. In this paper, we present asymptotic closed-form expressions for the mean and variance of the mutual information metric for a multi-antenna transmitter-receiver pair in the presence of multiple RISs, using methods from statistical physics. While nominally valid in the large system limit, we show that the derived Gaussian approximation for the mutual information can be quite accurate, even for modest-sized antenna arrays and metasurfaces. The above results are particularly useful when fast-fading conditions are present, which renders instantaneous channel estimation extremely challenging. We find that, when the channel close to an RIS is correlated, for instance due to small angle spread, which is reasonable for wireless systems with increasing carrier frequencies, the communication link benefits significantly from statistical RIS phase optimization, resulting in gains that are surprisingly higher than the nearly uncorrelated case. Using our novel asymptotic properties of the correlation matrices of the impinging and outgoing signals at the RISs, we can optimize the metasurfaces without brute-force numerical optimization. Furthermore, when the desired reflection from any of the RISs departs significantly from geometrical optics, the metasurfaces can be optimized to provide robust communication links, without significant need for their optimal placement.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Channel Estimation for RIS-Empowered Multi-User MISO Wireless Communications

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) have been recently considered as an energy-efficient solution for future wireless networks due to their fast and low-power configuration, which has increased potential in enabling massive connectivity and low-latency communications. Accurate and low-overhead channel estimation in RIS-based systems is one of the most critical challenges due to the usually large number of RIS unit elements and their distinctive hardware constraints. In this paper, we focus on the uplink of a RIS-empowered multi-user Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) uplink communication systems and propose a channel estimation framework based on the parallel factor decomposition to unfold the resulting cascaded channel model. We present two iterative estimation algorithms for the channels between the base station and RIS, as well as the channels between RIS and users. One is based on alternating least squares (ALS), while the other uses vector approximate message passing to iteratively reconstruct two unknown channels from the estimated vectors. To theoretically assess the performance of the ALS-based algorithm, we derived its estimation Cramér-Rao Bound (CRB). We also discuss the downlink achievable sum rate computation with estimated channels and different precoding schemes for the base station. Our extensive simulation results show that our algorithms outperform benchmark schemes and that the ALS technique achieves the CRB. It is also demonstrated that the sum rate using the estimated channels always reach that of perfect channels under various settings, thus, verifying the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed estimation algorithms.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Time Reversal for 6G Spatiotemporal Focusing: Recent Experiments, Opportunities, and Challenges

Late visions and trends for the future sixth Generation (6G) of wireless communications advocate, among other technologies, towards the deployment of network nodes with extreme numbers of antennas and up to terahertz frequencies, as means to enable various immersive applications. However, these technologies impose several challenges in the design of radio-frequency front-ends and beamforming architectures, as well as of ultra-wideband waveforms and computationally efficient transceiver signal processing. In this article, we revisit the Time Reversal (TR) technique, which was initially experimented in acoustics, in the context of large-bandwidth 6G wireless communications, capitalizing on its high resolution spatiotemporal focusing realized with low complexity transceivers. We first overview representative state-of-the-art in TR-based wireless communications, identifying the key competencies and requirements of TR for efficient operation. Recent and novel experimental setups and results for the spatiotemporal focusing capability of TR at the carrier frequencies $2.5$, $36$, and $273$ GHz are then presented, demonstrating in quantitative ways the technique's effectiveness in these very different frequency bands, as well as the roles of the available bandwidth and the number of transmit antennas. We also showcase the TR potential for realizing low complexity multi-user communications. The opportunities arising from TR-based wireless communications as well as the challenges for finding their place in 6G networks, also in conjunction with other complementary candidate technologies, are highlighted.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Pervasive Machine Learning for Smart Radio Environments Enabled by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

The emerging technology of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) is provisioned as an enabler of smart wireless environments, offering a highly scalable, low-cost, hardware-efficient, and almost energy-neutral solution for dynamic control of the propagation of electromagnetic signals over the wireless medium, ultimately providing increased environmental intelligence for diverse operation objectives. One of the major challenges with the envisioned dense deployment of RISs in such reconfigurable radio environments is the efficient configuration of multiple metasurfaces with limited, or even the absence of, computing hardware. In this paper, we consider multi-user and multi-RIS-empowered wireless systems, and present a thorough survey of the online machine learning approaches for the orchestration of their various tunable components. Focusing on the sum-rate maximization as a representative design objective, we present a comprehensive problem formulation based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). We detail the correspondences among the parameters of the wireless system and the DRL terminology, and devise generic algorithmic steps for the artificial neural network training and deployment, while discussing their implementation details. Further practical considerations for multi-RIS-empowered wireless communications in the sixth Generation (6G) era are presented along with some key open research challenges. Differently from the DRL-based status quo, we leverage the independence between the configuration of the system design parameters and the future states of the wireless environment, and present efficient multi-armed bandits approaches, whose resulting sum-rate performances are numerically shown to outperform random configurations, while being sufficiently close to the conventional Deep Q-Network (DQN) algorithm, but with lower implementation complexity.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Uplink Performance of Cell-Free Massive MIMO with Multi-Antenna Users Over Jointly-Correlated Rayleigh Fading Channels

In this paper, we investigate a cell-free massive MIMO system with both access points (APs) and user equipments (UEs) equipped with multiple antennas over jointly-correlated Rayleigh fading channels. We study four uplink implementations, from fully centralized processing to fully distributed processing, and derive their achievable spectral efficiency (SE) expressions with minimum mean-squared error successive interference cancellation (MMSE-SIC) detectors and arbitrary combining schemes. Furthermore, the global and local MMSE combining schemes are derived based on full and local channel state information (CSI) obtained under pilot contamination, which can maximize the achievable SE for the fully centralized and distributed implementation, respectively. We study a two-layer decoding implementation with an arbitrary combining scheme in the first layer and optimal large-scale fading decoding (LSFD) in the second layer. Besides, we compute novel closed-form SE expressions for the two-layer decoding implementation with maximum ratio (MR) combining. In the numerical results, we compare the SE performance for different implementation levels, combining schemes, and channel models. It is important to note that increasing the number of antennas per UE may degrade the SE performance.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

RIS-Aided Wireless Communications: Extra Degrees of Freedom via Rotation and Location Optimization

We consider the extra degree of freedom offered by the rotation of the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) plane and investigate its potential in improving the performance of RIS-assisted wireless communication systems. By considering radiation pattern modeling at all involved nodes, we first derive the composite channel gain and present a closed-form upper bound for the system ergodic capacity over cascade Rician fading channels. Then, we reconstruct the composite channel gain by taking the rotations at the RIS plane, transmit antenna, and receive antenna into account, and extract the optimal rotation angles after investigating their impacts on the capacity. Moreover, we present a location-dependent expression of the ergodic capacity and investigate the RIS deployment strategy, i.e. the joint rotation adjustment and location selection. Finally, simulation results verify the accuracy of the theoretical analyses and deployment strategy. Although the RIS location has a big impact on the performance, our results showcase that the RIS rotation plays a more important role. In other words, we can obtain a considerable improvement by properly rotating the RIS rather than moving it over a wide area. For instance, we can achieve more than 200\% performance improvement through rotating the RIS by 42.14$^{\circ}$, while an 150\% improvement is obtained by shifting the RIS over 400 meters.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Iteratively Weighted MMSE Uplink Precoding for Cell-Free Massive MIMO

In this paper, we investigate a cell-free massive MIMO system with both access points and user equipments equipped with multiple antennas over the Weichselberger Rayleigh fading channel. We study the uplink spectral efficiency (SE) based on a two-layer decoding structure with maximum ratio (MR) or local minimum mean-square error (MMSE) combining applied in the first layer and optimal large-scale fading decoding method implemented in the second layer, respectively. To maximize the weighted sum SE, an uplink precoding structure based on an Iteratively Weighted sum-MMSE (I-WMMSE) algorithm using only channel statistics is proposed. Furthermore, with MR combining applied in the first layer, we derive novel achievable SE expressions and optimal precoding structures in closed-form. Numerical results validate our proposed results and show that the I-WMMSE precoding can achieve excellent sum SE performance.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2021

C-GRBFnet: A Physics-Inspired Generative Deep Neural Network for Channel Representation and Prediction

In this paper, we aim to efficiently and accurately predict the static channel impulse response (CIR) with only the user's position information and a set of channel instances obtained within a certain wireless communication environment. Such a problem is by no means trivial since it needs to reconstruct the high-dimensional information (here the CIR everywhere) from the extremely low-dimensional data (here the location coordinates), which often results in overfitting and large prediction error. To this end, we resort to a novel physics-inspired generative approach. Specifically, we first use a forward deep neural network to infer the positions of all possible images of the source reflected by the surrounding scatterers within that environment, and then use the well-known Gaussian Radial Basis Function network (GRBF) to approximate the amplitudes of all possible propagation paths. We further incorporate the most recently developed sinusoidal representation network (SIREN) into the proposed network to implicitly represent the highly dynamic phases of all possible paths, which usually cannot be well predicted by the conventional neural networks with non-periodic activators. The resultant framework of Cosine-Gaussian Radial Basis Function network (C-GRBFnet) is also extended to the MIMO channel case. Key performance measures including prediction accuracy, convergence speed, network scale and robustness to channel estimation error are comprehensively evaluated and compared with existing popular networks, which show that our proposed network is much more efficient in representing, learning and predicting wireless channels in a given communication environment.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2021

Capacity Optimization using Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: A Large System Approach

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs), comprising large numbers of low-cost and passive metamaterials with tunable reflection properties, have been recently proposed as an enabler for programmable radio propagation environments. However, the role of the channel conditions near the RISs on their optimizability has not been analyzed adequately. In this paper, we present an asymptotic closed-form expression for the mutual information of a multi-antenna transmitter-receiver pair in the presence of multiple RISs, in the large-antenna limit, using the random matrix and replica theories. Under mild assumptions, asymptotic expressions for the eigenvalues and the eigenvectors of the channel covariance matrices are derived. We find that, when the channel close to an RIS is correlated, for instance due to small angle spread, the communication link benefits significantly from the RIS optimization, resulting in gains that are surprisingly higher than the nearly uncorrelated case. Furthermore, when the desired reflection from the RIS departs significantly from geometrical optics, the surface can be optimized to provide robust communication links. Building on the properties of the eigenvectors of the covariance matrices, we are able to find the optimal response of the RISs in closed form, bypassing the need for brute-force optimization.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2021

A Spectral Dominance Approach to Large Random Matrices

This paper presents a novel approach to characterize the dynamics of the limit spectrum of large random matrices. This approach is based upon the notion we call "spectral dominance". In particular, we show that the limit spectral measure can be determined as the derivative of the unique viscosity solution of a partial integro-differential equation. This also allows to make general and "short" proofs for the convergence problem. We treat the cases of Dyson Brownian motions, Wishart processes and present a general class of models for which this characterization holds.

math.AP↗

arXiv2021

Predictive Control and Communication Co-Design via Two-Way Gaussian Process Regression and AoI-Aware Scheduling

This article studies the joint problem of uplink-downlink scheduling and power allocation for controlling a large number of actuators that upload their states to remote controllers and download control actions over wireless links. To overcome the lack of wireless resources, we propose a machine learning-based solution, where only a fraction of actuators is controlled, while the rest of the actuators are actuated by locally predicting the missing state and/or action information using the previous uplink and/or downlink receptions via a Gaussian process regression (GPR). This GPR prediction credibility is determined using the age-of-information (AoI) of the latest reception. Moreover, the successful reception is affected by the transmission power, mandating a co-design of the communication and control operations. To this end, we formulate a network-wide minimization problem of the average AoI and transmission power under communication reliability and control stability constraints. To solve the problem, we propose a dynamic control algorithm using the Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty optimization framework. Numerical results corroborate that the proposed algorithm can stably control $2$x more number of actuators compared to an event-triggered scheduling baseline with Kalman filtering and frequency division multiple access, which is $18$x larger than a round-robin scheduling baseline.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2021

Communication Efficient Distributed Learning with Censored, Quantized, and Generalized Group ADMM

In this paper, we propose a communication-efficiently decentralized machine learning framework that solves a consensus optimization problem defined over a network of inter-connected workers. The proposed algorithm, Censored and Quantized Generalized GADMM (CQ-GGADMM), leverages the worker grouping and decentralized learning ideas of Group Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (GADMM), and pushes the frontier in communication efficiency by extending its applicability to generalized network topologies, while incorporating link censoring for negligible updates after quantization. We theoretically prove that CQ-GGADMM achieves the linear convergence rate when the local objective functions are strongly convex under some mild assumptions. Numerical simulations corroborate that CQ-GGADMM exhibits higher communication efficiency in terms of the number of communication rounds and transmit energy consumption without compromising the accuracy and convergence speed, compared to the censored decentralized ADMM, and the worker grouping method of GADMM.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Mean-Field Game-Theoretic Edge Caching

In this book chapter, we study a problem of distributed content caching in an ultra-dense edge caching network (UDCN), in which a large number of small base stations (SBSs) prefetch popular files to cope with the ever-growing user demand in 5G and beyond. In a UDCN, even a small misprediction of user demand may render a large amount of prefetched data obsolete. Furtherproacmore, the interference variance is high due to the short inter-SBS distances, making it difficult to quantify data downloading rates. Lastly, since the caching decision of each SBS interacts with those of all other SBSs, the problem complexity of exponentially increases with the number of SBSs, which is unfit for UDCNs. To resolve such challenging issues while reflecting time-varying and location-dependent user demand, we leverage mean-field game (MFG) theory through which each SBS interacts only with a single virtual SBS whose state is drawn from the state distribution of the entire SBS population, i.e., mean-field (MF) distribution. This MF approximation asymptotically guarantees achieving the epsilon Nash equilibrium as the number of SBSs approaches infinity. To describe such an MFG-theoretic caching framework, this chapter aims to provide a brief review of MFG, and demonstrate its effectiveness for UDCNs.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Communication-Efficient and Distributed Learning Over Wireless Networks: Principles and Applications

Machine learning (ML) is a promising enabler for the fifth generation (5G) communication systems and beyond. By imbuing intelligence into the network edge, edge nodes can proactively carry out decision-making, and thereby react to local environmental changes and disturbances while experiencing zero communication latency. To achieve this goal, it is essential to cater for high ML inference accuracy at scale under time-varying channel and network dynamics, by continuously exchanging fresh data and ML model updates in a distributed way. Taming this new kind of data traffic boils down to improving the communication efficiency of distributed learning by optimizing communication payload types, transmission techniques, and scheduling, as well as ML architectures, algorithms, and data processing methods. To this end, this article aims to provide a holistic overview of relevant communication and ML principles, and thereby present communication-efficient and distributed learning frameworks with selected use cases.

cs.LG↗