A Low-Complexity Machine Learning Design for mmWave Beam Prediction

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is currently studying machine learning (ML) for the fifth generation (5G)-Advanced New Radio (NR) air interface, where spatial and temporal-domain beam prediction are important use cases. With this background, this letter presents a low-complexity ML design that expedites the spatial-domain beam prediction to reduce the power consumption and the reference signaling overhead, which are currently imperative for frequent beam measurements. Complexity analysis and evaluation results showcase that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with lower computational complexity, resulting in reduced power consumption and faster beam prediction. Furthermore, important observations on the generalization of the proposed model are presented in this letter.

Towards an AI-enabled Connected Industry: AGV Communication and Sensor Measurement Datasets

This paper presents two wireless measurement campaigns in industrial testbeds: industrial Vehicle-to-vehicle (iV2V) and industrial Vehicle-to-infrastructure plus Sensor (iV2I+). Detailed information about the two captured datasets is provided as well. iV2V covers sidelink communication scenarios between Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs), while iV2I+ is conducted at an industrial setting where an autonomous cleaning robot is connected to a private cellular network. The combination of different communication technologies, together with a common measurement methodology, provides insights that can be exploited by Machine Learning (ML) for tasks such as fingerprinting, line-of-sight detection, prediction of quality of service or link selection. Moreover, the datasets are labelled and pre-filtered for fast on-boarding and applicability. The corresponding testbeds and measurements are also presented in detail for both datasets.

Berlin V2X: A Machine Learning Dataset from Multiple Vehicles and Radio Access Technologies

The evolution of wireless communications into 6G and beyond is expected to rely on new machine learning (ML)-based capabilities. These can enable proactive decisions and actions from wireless-network components to sustain quality-of-service (QoS) and user experience. Moreover, new use cases in the area of vehicular and industrial communications will emerge. Specifically in the area of vehicle communication, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) schemes will benefit strongly from such advances. With this in mind, we have conducted a detailed measurement campaign with the purpose of enabling a plethora of diverse ML-based studies. The resulting datasets offer GPS-located wireless measurements across diverse urban environments for both cellular (with two different operators) and sidelink radio access technologies, thus enabling a variety of different studies towards V2X. The datasets are labeled and sampled with a high time resolution. Furthermore, we make the data publicly available with all the necessary information to support the on-boarding of new researchers. We provide an initial analysis of the data showing some of the challenges that ML needs to overcome and the features that ML can leverage, as well as some hints at potential research studies.

A Comprehensive Survey of Spectrum Sharing Schemes from a Standardization and Implementation Perspective

As the services and requirements of next-generation wireless networks become increasingly diversified, it is estimated that the current frequency bands of mobile network operators (MNOs) will be unable to cope with the immensity of anticipated demands. Due to spectrum scarcity, there has been a growing trend among stakeholders toward identifying practical solutions to make the most productive use of the exclusively allocated bands on a shared basis through spectrum sharing mechanisms. However, due to the technical complexities of these mechanisms, their design presents challenges, as it requires coordination among multiple entities. To address this challenge, in this paper, we begin with a detailed review of the recent literature on spectrum sharing methods, classifying them on the basis of their operational frequency regime that is, whether they are implemented to operate in licensed bands (e.g., licensed shared access (LSA), spectrum access system (SAS), and dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS)) or unlicensed bands (e.g., LTE-unlicensed (LTE-U), licensed assisted access (LAA), MulteFire, and new radio-unlicensed (NR-U)). Then, in order to narrow the gap between the standardization and vendor-specific implementations, we provide a detailed review of the potential implementation scenarios and necessary amendments to legacy cellular networks from the perspective of telecom vendors and regulatory bodies. Next, we analyze applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques for facilitating spectrum sharing mechanisms and leveraging the full potential of autonomous sharing scenarios. Finally, we conclude the paper by presenting open research challenges, which aim to provide insights into prospective research endeavors.

AoI-Aware Resource Allocation for Platoon-Based C-V2X Networks via Multi-Agent Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

This paper investigates the problem of age of information (AoI) aware radio resource management for a platooning system. Multiple autonomous platoons exploit the cellular wireless vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) communication technology to disseminate the cooperative awareness messages (CAMs) to their followers while ensuring timely delivery of safety-critical messages to the Road-Side Unit (RSU). Due to the challenges of dynamic channel conditions, centralized resource management schemes that require global information are inefficient and lead to large signaling overheads. Hence, we exploit a distributed resource allocation framework based on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where each platoon leader (PL) acts as an agent and interacts with the environment to learn its optimal policy. Existing MARL algorithms consider a holistic reward function for the group's collective success, which often ends up with unsatisfactory results and cannot guarantee an optimal policy for each agent. Consequently, motivated by the existing literature in RL, we propose a novel MARL framework that trains two critics with the following goals: A global critic which estimates the global expected reward and motivates the agents toward a cooperating behavior and an exclusive local critic for each agent that estimates the local individual reward. Furthermore, based on the tasks each agent has to accomplish, the individual reward of each agent is decomposed into multiple sub-reward functions where task-wise value functions are learned separately. Numerical results indicate our proposed algorithm's effectiveness compared with the conventional RL methods applied in this area.