Near-Field Communications for Extremely Large-Scale MIMO: A Beamspace Perspective

Extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) is regarded as one of the key techniques to enhance the performance of future wireless communications. Different from regular MIMO, the XL-MIMO shifts part of the communication region from the far field to the near field, where the spherical-wave channel model cannot be accurately approximated by the commonly-adopted planar-wave channel model. As a result, the well-explored far-field beamspace is unsuitable for near-field communications, thereby requiring the exploration of specialized near-field beamspace. In this article, we investigate the near-field communications for XL-MIMO from the perspective of beamspace. Given the spherical wavefront characteristics of the near-field channels, we first map the antenna space to the near-field beamspace with the fractional Fourier transform. Then, we divide the near-field beamspace into three parts, including high mainlobe, low mainlobe, and sidelobe, and provide a comprehensive analysis of these components. Based on the analysis, we demonstrate the advantages of the near-field beamspace over the existing methods. Finally, we point out several applications of the near-field beamspace and highlight some potential directions for future study in the near-field beamspace.

Downlink Beamforming for Cell-Free ISAC: A Fast Complex Oblique Manifold Approach

Cell-free integrated sensing and communication (CF-ISAC) systems are just emerging as an interesting technique for future communications. Such a system comprises several multiple-antenna access points (APs), serving multiple single-antenna communication users and sensing targets. However, efficient beamforming designs that achieve high precision and robust performance in densely populated networks are lacking. This paper proposes a new beamforming algorithm by exploiting the inherent Riemannian manifold structure. The aim is to maximize the communication sum rate while satisfying sensing beampattern gains and per AP transmit power constraints. To address this constrained optimization problem, a highly efficient augmented Lagrangian model-based iterative manifold optimization for CF-ISAC (ALMCI) algorithm is developed. This algorithm exploits the geometry of the proposed problem and uses a complex oblique manifold. Conventional convex-concave procedure (CCPA) and multidimensional complex quadratic transform (MCQT)-CSA algorithms are also developed as comparative benchmarks. The ALMCI algorithm significantly outperforms both of these. For example, with 16 APs having 12 antennas and 30 dBm transmit power each, our proposed ALMCI algorithm yields 22.7% and 6.7% sum rate gains over the CCPA and MCQT-CSA algorithms, respectively. In addition to improvement in communication capacity, the ALMCI algorithm achieves superior beamforming gains and reduced complexity.

Fast Adaptation for Deep Learning-based Wireless Communications

The integration with artificial intelligence (AI) is recognized as one of the six usage scenarios in next-generation wireless communications. However, several critical challenges hinder the widespread application of deep learning (DL) techniques in wireless communications. In particular, existing DL-based wireless communications struggle to adapt to the rapidly changing wireless environments. In this paper, we discuss fast adaptation for DL-based wireless communications by using few-shot learning (FSL) techniques. We first identify the differences between fast adaptation in wireless communications and traditional AI tasks by highlighting two distinct FSL design requirements for wireless communications. To establish a wide perspective, we present a comprehensive review of the existing FSL techniques in wireless communications that satisfy these two design requirements. In particular, we emphasize the importance of applying domain knowledge in achieving fast adaptation. We specifically focus on multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) precoding as an examples to demonstrate the advantages of the FSL to achieve fast adaptation in wireless communications. Finally, we highlight several open research issues for achieving broadscope future deployment of fast adaptive DL in wireless communication applications.

Meta-Learning Empowered Graph Neural Networks for Radio Resource Management

In this paper, we consider a radio resource management (RRM) problem in the dynamic wireless networks, comprising multiple communication links that share the same spectrum resource. To achieve high network throughput while ensuring fairness across all links, we formulate a resilient power optimization problem with per-user minimum-rate constraints. We obtain the corresponding Lagrangian dual problem and parameterize all variables with neural networks, which can be trained in an unsupervised manner due to the provably acceptable duality gap. We develop a meta-learning approach with graph neural networks (GNNs) as parameterization that exhibits fast adaptation and scalability to varying network configurations. We formulate the objective of meta-learning by amalgamating the Lagrangian functions of different network configurations and utilize a first-order meta-learning algorithm, called Reptile, to obtain the meta-parameters. Numerical results verify that our method can efficiently improve the overall throughput and ensure the minimum rate performance. We further demonstrate that using the meta-parameters as initialization, our method can achieve fast adaptation to new wireless network configurations and reduce the number of required training data samples.

Beam Prediction based on Large Language Models

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication is promising for next-generation wireless networks but suffers from significant path loss, requiring extensive antenna arrays and frequent beam training. Traditional deep learning models, such as long short-term memory (LSTM), enhance beam tracking accuracy however are limited by poor robustness and generalization. In this letter, we use large language models (LLMs) to improve the robustness of beam prediction. By converting time series data into text-based representations and employing the Prompt-as-Prefix (PaP) technique for contextual enrichment, our approach unleashes the strength of LLMs for time series forecasting. Simulation results demonstrate that our LLM-based method offers superior robustness and generalization compared to LSTM-based models, showcasing the potential of LLMs in wireless communications.

Machine Learning in Communications: A Road to Intelligent Transmission and Processing

Prior to the era of artificial intelligence and big data, wireless communications primarily followed a conventional research route involving problem analysis, model building and calibration, algorithm design and tuning, and holistic and empirical verification. However, this methodology often encountered limitations when dealing with large-scale and complex problems and managing dynamic and massive data, resulting in inefficiencies and limited performance of traditional communication systems and methods. As such, wireless communications have embraced the revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning, giving birth to more adaptive, efficient, and intelligent systems and algorithms. This technological shift opens a road to intelligent information transmission and processing. This overview article discusses the typical roles of machine learning in intelligent wireless communications, as well as its features, challenges, and practical considerations.

White-Box 3D-OMP-Transformer for ISAC

Transformers have found broad applications for their great ability to capture long-range dependency among the inputs using attention mechanisms. The recent success of transformers increases the need for mathematical interpretation of their underlying working mechanisms, leading to the development of a family of white-box transformer-like deep network architectures. However, designing white-box transformers with efficient three-dimensional (3D) attention is still an open challenge. In this work, we revisit the 3D-orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm and demonstrate that the operation of 3D-OMP is analogous to a specific kind of transformer with 3D attention. Therefore, we build a white-box 3D-OMP-transformer by introducing additional learnable parameters to 3D-OMP. As a transformer, its 3D-attention can be mathematically interpreted from 3D-OMP; while as a variant of OMP, it can learn to improve the matching pursuit process from data. Besides, a transformer's performance can be improved by stacking more transformer blocks. To simulate this process, we design a cascaded 3D-OMP-Transformer with dynamic small-scale dictionaries, which can improve the performance of the 3D-OMP-Transformer with low costs. We evaluate the designed 3D-OMP-transformer in the multi-target detection task of integrated sensing and communications (ISAC). Experimental results show that the designed 3D-OMP-Transformer can outperform current baselines.

BADM: Batch ADMM for Deep Learning

Stochastic gradient descent-based algorithms are widely used for training deep neural networks but often suffer from slow convergence. To address the challenge, we leverage the framework of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to develop a novel data-driven algorithm, called batch ADMM (BADM). The fundamental idea of the proposed algorithm is to split the training data into batches, which is further divided into sub-batches where primal and dual variables are updated to generate global parameters through aggregation. We evaluate the performance of BADM across various deep learning tasks, including graph modelling, computer vision, image generation, and natural language processing. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that BADM achieves faster convergence and superior testing accuracy compared to other state-of-the-art optimizers.

Near-Field Multiuser Communications based on Sparse Arrays

This paper considers near-field multiuser communications based on sparse arrays (SAs). First, for the uniform SAs (USAs), we analyze the beam gains of channel steering vectors, which shows that increasing the antenna spacings can effectively improve the spatial resolution of the antenna arrays to enhance the sum rate of multiuser communications. Then, we investigate nonuniform SAs (NSAs) to mitigate the high multiuser interference from the grating lobes of the USAs. To maximize the sum rate of near-field multiuser communications, we optimize the antenna positions of the NSAs, where a successive convex approximation-based antenna position optimization algorithm is proposed. Moreover, we find that the channels of both the USAs and the NSAs show uniform sparsity in the defined surrogate distance-angle (SD-A) domain. Based on the channel sparsity, an on-grid SD-A-domain orthogonal matching pursuit (SDA-OMP) algorithm is developed to estimate multiuser channels. To further improve the resolution of the SDA-OMP, we also design an off-grid SD-A-domain iterative super-resolution channel estimation algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed methods.

Rescale-Invariant Federated Reinforcement Learning for Resource Allocation in V2X Networks

Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL) offers a promising solution to various practical challenges in resource allocation for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks. However, the data discrepancy among individual agents can significantly degrade the performance of FRL-based algorithms. To address this limitation, we exploit the node-wise invariance property of ReLU-activated neural networks, with the aim of reducing data discrepancy to improve learning performance. Based on this property, we introduce a backward rescale-invariant operation to develop a rescale-invariant FRL algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm notably enhances both convergence speed and convergent performance.