The thriving of artificial intelligence (AI) applications is driving the further evolution of wireless networks. It has been envisioned that 6G will be transformative and will revolutionize the evolution of wireless from “connected things” to “connected intelligence”. However, state-of-the-art deep learning and big data analytics based AI systems require tremendous computation and communication resources, causing significant latency, energy consumption, network congestion, and privacy leakage in both of the training and inference processes. By embedding model training and inference capabilities into the network edge, edge AI stands out as a disruptive technology for 6G to seamlessly integrate sensing, communication, computation, and intelligence, thereby improving the efficiency, effectiveness, privacy, and security of 6G networks. In this paper, we shall provide our vision for scalable and trustworthy edge AI systems with integrated design of wireless communication strategies and decentralized machine learning models. New design principles of wireless networks, service-driven resource allocation optimization methods, as well as a holistic end-to-end system architecture to support edge AI will be described. Standardization, software and hardware platforms, and application scenarios are also discussed to facilitate the industrialization and commercialization of edge AI systems.

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.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved remarkable breakthroughs in a wide range of fields, ranging from speech processing, image classification to drug discovery. This is driven by the explosive growth of data, advances in machine learning (especially deep learning), and the easy access to powerful computing resources. Particularly, the wide scale deployment of edge devices (e.g., IoT devices) generates an unprecedented scale of data, which provides the opportunity to derive accurate models and develop various intelligent applications at the network edge. However, such enormous data cannot all be sent to the cloud for processing, due to the varying channel quality, traffic congestion and/or privacy concerns, and the enormous energy consumption. By pushing inference and training processes of AI models to edge nodes, edge AI has emerged as a promising alternative. AI at the edge requires close cooperation among edge devices, such as smart phones and smart vehicles, and edge servers at the wireless access points and base stations, which however result in heavy communication overheads. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the recent developments in various techniques for overcoming these communication challenges. Specifically, we first identify key communication challenges in edge AI systems. We then introduce communication-efficient techniques, from both algorithmic and system perspectives for training and inference tasks at the network edge. Potential future research directions are also highlighted.

Deep learning has recently emerged as a disruptive technology to solve challenging radio resource management problems in wireless networks. However, the neural network architectures adopted by existing works suffer from poor scalability and generalization, and lack of interpretability. A long-standing approach to improve scalability and generalization is to incorporate the structures of the target task into the neural network architecture. In this paper, we propose to apply graph neural networks (GNNs) to solve large-scale radio resource management problems, supported by effective neural network architecture design and theoretical analysis. Specifically, we first demonstrate that radio resource management problems can be formulated as graph optimization problems that enjoy a universal permutation equivariance property. We then identify a family of neural networks, named message passing graph neural networks (MPGNNs). It is demonstrated that they not only satisfy the permutation equivariance property, but also can generalize to large-scale problems, while enjoying a high computational efficiency. For interpretablity and theoretical guarantees, we prove the equivalence between MPGNNs and a family of distributed optimization algorithms, which is then used to analyze the performance and generalization of MPGNN-based methods. Extensive simulations, with power control and beamforming as two examples, demonstrate that the proposed method, trained in an unsupervised manner with unlabeled samples, matches or even outperforms classic optimization-based algorithms without domain-specific knowledge. Remarkably, the proposed method is highly scalable and can solve the beamforming problem in an interference channel with 1000 transceiver pairs within 6 milliseconds on a single GPU.

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 adopt three intelligent tasks, including, image retrieval, machine translation, and visual question answering (VQA) as the transmission goal of semantic communication systems. We propose a Transformer based framework to unify the structure of transmitters for different tasks. For the single-modal multi-user system, we 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 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.

This paper investigates reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) networks with rate splitting multiple access (RSMA). An energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem is formulated subject to the power budget at the transmitter and the quality of service (QoS) requirements of both information communication and energy harvesting, where the beamforming vectors, the power splitting (PS) ratios, the common message rates, and the discrete phase shifts are jointly optimized. To tackle the non-convex problem with both discrete and continuous variables, a deep reinforcement learning-based approach is proposed with the proximal policy optimization (PPO) framework. Different from traditional optimization approaches which optimizes the beamforming vectors and phase shifts separately and alternatively, our proposed PPO-based approach optimizes all the variables in unison. Besides, to perform beamforming design in action space, the beamforming vectors for the common stream and the private stream are respectively designed based on the maximum-ratio transmission and the zero forcing to enhance both energy and information transmission. To evaluate the performance of the PPO-based approach, a successive convex approximation (SCA) and Dinkelbach’s method based solution scheme (named SCA-D scheme) is also presented. Simulation results show that the system EE obtained by the proposed PPO-based approach is close to that obtained by the SCA-D scheme while outperforming various benchmarks. The RSMA contributes to the EE of the system greatly compared with traditional scheme. As for the case of time-varying channels, the proposed PPO-based approach is with much smaller running time by only sacrificing a slight EE performance compared with the SCA-D scheme.