In this work, we consider a mobile edge computing system with both ultra-reliable and low-latency communications services and delay tolerant services. We aim to minimize the normalized energy consumption, defined as the energy consumption per bit, by optimizing user association, resource allocation, and offloading probabilities subject to the quality-of-service requirements. The user association is managed by the mobility management entity (MME), while resource allocation and offloading probabilities are determined by each access point (AP). We propose a deep learning (DL) architecture, where a digital twin of the real network environment is used to train the DL algorithm off-line at a central server. From the pre-trained deep neural network (DNN), the MME can obtain user association scheme in a real-time manner. Considering that real networks are not static, the digital twin monitors the variation of real networks and updates the DNN accordingly. For a given user association scheme, we propose an optimization algorithm to find the optimal resource allocation and offloading probabilities at each AP. Simulation results show that our method can achieve lower normalized energy consumption with less computation complexity compared with an existing method and approach to the performance of the global optimal solution.

To accommodate diverse Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements in 5th generation cellular networks, base stations need real-time optimization of radio resources in time-varying network conditions. This brings high computing overheads and long processing delays. In this work, we develop a deep learning framework to approximate the optimal resource allocation policy that minimizes the total power consumption of a base station by optimizing bandwidth and transmit power allocation. We find that a fully-connected neural network (NN) cannot fully guarantee the QoS requirements due to the approximation errors and quantization errors of the numbers of subcarriers. To tackle this problem, we propose a cascaded structure of NNs, where the first NN approximates the optimal bandwidth allocation, and the second NN outputs the transmit power required to satisfy the QoS requirement with given bandwidth allocation. Considering that the distribution of wireless channels and the types of services in the wireless networks are non-stationary, we apply deep transfer learning to update NNs in non-stationary wireless networks. Simulation results validate that the cascaded NNs outperform the fully connected NN in terms of QoS guarantee. In addition, deep transfer learning can reduce the number of training samples required to train the NNs remarkably.

In this paper, we develop a knowledge-assisted deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm to design wireless schedulers in the fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks with time-sensitive traffic. Since the scheduling policy is a deterministic mapping from channel and queue states to scheduling actions, it can be optimized by using deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG). We show that a straightforward implementation of DDPG converges slowly, has a poor quality-of-service (QoS) performance, and cannot be implemented in real-world 5G systems, which are non-stationary in general. To address these issues, we propose a theoretical DRL framework, where theoretical models from wireless communications are used to formulate a Markov decision process in DRL. To reduce the convergence time and improve the QoS of each user, we design a knowledge-assisted DDPG (K-DDPG) that exploits expert knowledge of the scheduler design problem, such as the knowledge of the QoS, the target scheduling policy, and the importance of each training sample, determined by the approximation error of the value function and the number of packet losses. Furthermore, we develop an architecture for online training and inference, where K-DDPG initializes the scheduler off-line and then fine-tunes the scheduler online to handle the mismatch between off-line simulations and non-stationary real-world systems. Simulation results show that our approach reduces the convergence time of DDPG significantly and achieves better QoS than existing schedulers (reducing 30% ~ 50% packet losses). Experimental results show that with off-line initialization, our approach achieves better initial QoS than random initialization and the online fine-tuning converges in few minutes.

The order-of-magnitude increase in the dimension of antenna arrays, which forms extra-large-scale massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems, enables substantial improvement in spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, and spatial resolution. However, practical challenges, such as excessive computational complexity and excess of baseband data to be transferred and processed, prohibit the use of centralized processing. A promising solution is to distribute baseband data from disjoint subsets of antennas into parallel processing procedures coordinated by a central processing unit. This solution is called subarray-based architecture. In this work, we extend the application of expectation propagation (EP) principle, which effectively balances performance and practical feasibility in conventional centralized MIMO detector design, to fit the subarray-based architecture. Analytical results confirm the convergence of the proposed iterative procedure and that the proposed detector asymptotically approximates Bayesian optimal performance under certain conditions. The proposed subarray-based EP detector is reduced to centralized EP detector when only one subarray exists. In addition, we propose additional strategies for further reducing the complexity and overhead of the information exchange between parallel subarrays and the central processing unit to facilitate the practical implementation of the proposed detector. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed detector achieves numerical stability within few iterations and outperforms its counterparts.

Recent advances in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, have made them able to communicate and collaborate, forming flying ad hoc networks (FANETs). FANETs are becoming popular in many application domains, including precision agriculture, goods delivery, construction, environment and climate monitoring, and military surveillance. These interesting new avenues for the use of UAVs are motivating researchers to rethink the existing research on FANETs. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive and thorough review of the different types of UAVs used in FANETs, their mobility models, main characteristics, and applications, as well as the routing protocols used in this type of network. Other important contributions of this paper include the investigation of emerging technologies integrated with FANETs.

Multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems can be used to meet high throughput requirements of 5G and beyond networks. A base station serves many users in an uplink MU-MIMO system, leading to a substantial multi-user interference (MUI). Designing a high-performance detector for dealing with a strong MUI is challenging. This paper analyses the performance degradation caused by the posterior distribution approximation used in the state-of-the-art message passing (MP) detectors in the presence of high MUI. We develop a graph neural network based framework to fine-tune the MP detectors’ cavity distributions and thus improve the posterior distribution approximation in the MP detectors. We then propose two novel neural network based detectors which rely on the expectation propagation (EP) and Bayesian parallel interference cancellation (BPIC), referred to as the GEPNet and GPICNet detectors, respectively. The GEPNet detector maximizes detection performance, while GPICNet detector balances the performance and complexity. We provide proof of the permutation equivariance property, allowing the detectors to be trained only once, even in the systems with dynamic changes of the number of users. The simulation results show that the proposed GEPNet detector performance approaches maximum likelihood performance in various configurations and GPICNet detector doubles the multiplexing gain of BPIC detector.