Communication and Control Co-Design in 6G: Sequential Decision-Making with LLMs

This article investigates a control system within the context of six-generation wireless networks. The control performance optimization confronts the technical challenges that arise from the intricate interactions between communication and control sub-systems, asking for a co-design. Accounting for the system dynamics, we formulate the sequential co-design decision-makings of communication and control over the discrete time horizon as a Markov decision process, for which a practical offline learning framework is proposed. Our proposed framework integrates large language models into the elements of reinforcement learning. We present a case study on the age of semantics-aware communication and control co-design to showcase the potentials from our proposed learning framework. Furthermore, we discuss the open issues remaining to make our proposed offline learning framework feasible for real-world implementations, and highlight the research directions for future explorations.

Rethinking Collaborative Perception from the Spatial-Temporal Importance of Semantic Information

Collaboration by the sharing of semantic information is crucial to enable the enhancement of perception capabilities. However, existing collaborative perception methods tend to focus solely on the spatial features of semantic information, while neglecting the importance of the temporal dimension in collaborator selection and semantic information fusion, which instigates performance degradation. In this article, we propose a novel collaborative perception framework, IoSI-CP, which takes into account the importance of semantic information (IoSI) from both temporal and spatial dimensions. Specifically, we develop an IoSI-based collaborator selection method that effectively identifies advantageous collaborators but excludes those that bring negative benefits. Moreover, we present a semantic information fusion algorithm called HPHA (historical prior hybrid attention), which integrates a multi-scale transformer module and a short-term attention module to capture IoSI from spatial and temporal dimensions, and assigns varying weights for efficient aggregation. Extensive experiments on two open datasets demonstrate that our proposed IoSI-CP significantly improves the perception performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The code associated with this research is publicly available at https://github.com/huangqzj/IoSI-CP/.

Semantics-enhanced Temporal Graph Networks for Content Caching and Energy Saving

The enormous amount of network equipment and users implies a tremendous growth of Internet traffic for multimedia services. To mitigate the traffic pressure, architectures with in-network storage are proposed to cache popular content at nodes in close proximity to users to shorten the backhaul links. Meanwhile, the reduction of transmission distance also contributes to the energy saving. However, due to limited storage, only a fraction of the content can be cached, while caching the most popular content is cost-effective. Correspondingly, it becomes essential to devise an effective popularity prediction method. In this regard, existing efforts adopt dynamic graph neural network (DGNN) models, but it remains challenging to tackle sparse datasets. In this paper, we first propose a reformative temporal graph network, which is named STGN, that utilizes extra semantic messages to enhance the temporal and structural learning of a DGNN model, since the consideration of semantics can help establish implicit paths within the sparse interaction graph and hence improve the prediction performance. Furthermore, we propose a user-specific attention mechanism to fine-grainedly aggregate various semantics. Finally, extensive simulations verify the superiority of our STGN models and demonstrate their high potential in energy-saving.

Adversarial Learning for Implicit Semantic-Aware Communications

Semantic communication is a novel communication paradigm that focuses on recognizing and delivering the desired meaning of messages to the destination users. Most existing works in this area focus on delivering explicit semantics, labels or signal features that can be directly identified from the source signals. In this paper, we consider the implicit semantic communication problem in which hidden relations and closely related semantic terms that cannot be recognized from the source signals need to also be delivered to the destination user. We develop a novel adversarial learning-based implicit semantic-aware communication (iSAC) architecture in which the source user, instead of maximizing the total amount of information transmitted to the channel, aims to help the recipient learn an inference rule that can automatically generate implicit semantics based on limited clue information. We prove that by applying iSAC, the destination user can always learn an inference rule that matches the true inference rule of the source messages. Experimental results show that the proposed iSAC can offer up to a 19.69 dB improvement over existing non-inferential communication solutions, in terms of symbol error rate at the destination user.

Semantics-Empowered Communication: A Tutorial-cum-Survey

Along with the springing up of semantics-empowered communication (SemCom) researches, it is now witnessing an unprecedentedly growing interest towards a wide range of aspects (e.g., theories, applications, metrics and implementations) in both academia and industry. In this work, we primarily aim to provide a comprehensive survey on both the background and research taxonomy, as well as a detailed technical tutorial. Specifically, we start by reviewing the literature and answering the "what" and "why" questions in semantic transmissions. Afterwards, we present corresponding ecosystems, including theories, metrics, datasets and toolkits, on top of which the taxonomy for research directions is presented. Furthermore, we propose to categorize the critical enabling techniques by explicit and implicit reasoning-based methods, and elaborate on how they evolve and contribute to modern content \& channel semantics-empowered communications. Besides reviewing and summarizing the latest efforts in SemCom, we discuss the relations with other communication levels (e.g., reliable and goal-oriented communications) from a holistic and unified viewpoint. Subsequently, in order to facilitate the future developments and industrial applications, we also highlight advanced practical techniques for boosting semantic accuracy, robustness, and large-scale scalability, just to mention a few. Finally, we discuss the technical challenges that shed light on future research opportunities.

Age of Semantics in Cooperative Communications: To Expedite Simulation Towards Real via Offline Reinforcement Learning

The age of information metric fails to correctly describe the intrinsic semantics of a status update. In an intelligent reflecting surface-aided cooperative relay communication system, we propose the age of semantics (AoS) for measuring semantics freshness of the status updates. Specifically, we focus on the status updating from a source node (SN) to the destination, which is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP). The objective of the SN is to maximize the expected satisfaction of AoS and energy consumption under the maximum transmit power constraint. To seek the optimal control policy, we first derive an online deep actor-critic (DAC) learning scheme under the on-policy temporal difference learning framework. However, implementing the online DAC in practice poses the key challenge in infinitely repeated interactions between the SN and the system, which can be dangerous particularly during the exploration. We then put forward a novel offline DAC scheme, which estimates the optimal control policy from a previously collected dataset without any further interactions with the system. Numerical experiments verify the theoretical results and show that our offline DAC scheme significantly outperforms the online DAC scheme and the most representative baselines in terms of mean utility, demonstrating strong robustness to dataset quality.

Time-Critical Tasks Implementation in MEC based Multi-Robot Cooperation Systems

Mobile edge computing (MEC) deployment in a multi-robot cooperation (MRC) system is an effective way to accomplish the tasks in terms of energy consumption and implementation latency. However, the computation and communication resources need to be considered jointly to fully exploit the advantages brought by the MEC technology. In this paper, the scenario where multi robots cooperate to accomplish the time-critical tasks is studied, where an intelligent master robot (MR) acts as an edge server to provide services to multiple slave robots (SRs) and the SRs are responsible for the environment sensing and data collection. To save energy and prolong the function time of the system, two schemes are proposed to optimize the computation and communication resources, respectively. In the first scheme, the energy consumption of SRs is minimized and balanced while guaranteeing that the tasks are accomplished under a time constraint. In the second scheme, not only the energy consumption, but also the remaining energies of the SRs are considered to enhance the robustness of the system. Through the analysis and numerical simulations, we demonstrate that even though the first policy may guarantee the minimization on the total SRs' energy consumption, the function time of MRC system by the second scheme is longer than that by the first one.

Rethinking Modern Communication from Semantic Coding to Semantic Communication

Modern communications are usually designed to pursue a higher bit-level precision and fewer bits required to transmit a message. This article rethinks these two major features and introduces the concept and advantage of semantics that characterizes a new kind of semantics-aware communication mechanism, incorporating both the semantic encoding and the semantic communication problem. Within the unified framework, we analyze the underlying defects of existing semantics-aware techniques and establish a confidence-based distillation mechanism for the joint semantics-noise coding (JSNC) problem, and a reinforcement learning (RL)-powered semantic communication paradigm that endows a system the ability to convey the semantics instead of pursuing the bit level accuracy. On top of these technical contributions, this work provides a new insight to understand how the semantics are processed and represented in a semantics-aware coding and communication system, and verifies the significant benefits of doing so.

Reinforcement Learning-powered Semantic Communication via Semantic Similarity

We introduce a new semantic communication mechanism, whose key idea is to preserve the semantic information instead of strictly securing the bit-level precision. Starting by analyzing the defects of existing joint source channel coding (JSCC) methods, we show that the commonly used bit-level metrics are vulnerable of catching important semantic meaning and structures. To address this problem, we take advantage of learning from semantic similarity, instead of relying on conventional paired bit-level supervisions like cross entropy and bit error rate. However, to develop such a semantic communication system is indeed a nontrivial task, considering the nondifferentiability of most semantic metrics as well as the instability from noisy channels. To further resolve these issues, we put forward a reinforcement learning (RL)-based solution which allows us to simultaneously optimize any user-defined semantic measurement by using the policy gradient technique, and to interact with the surrounding noisy environment in a natural way. We have testified the proposed method in the challenging European-parliament dataset. Experiments on both AWGN and phase-invariant fading channel have confirmed the superiority of our method in revealing the semantic meanings, and better handling the channel noise especially in low-SNR situations. Apart from the experimental results, we further provide an indepth look at how the semantics model behaves, along with its superb generalization ability in real-life examples. As a brand new method in learning-based JSCC tasks, we also exemplify an RL-based image transmission paradigm, both to prove the generalization ability, and to leave this new topic for future discussion.

DRLE: Decentralized Reinforcement Learning at the Edge for Traffic Light Control

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) enables real-time data exchange among vehicles and roadside units and thus provides a promising solution to alleviate traffic jams in the urban area. Meanwhile, better traffic management via efficient traffic light control can benefit the IoV as well by enabling a better communication environment and decreasing the network load. As such, IoV and efficient traffic light control can formulate a virtuous cycle. Edge computing, an emerging technology to provide low-latency computation capabilities at the edge of the network, can further improve the performance of this cycle. However, while the collected information is valuable, an efficient solution for better utilization and faster feedback has yet to be developed for edge-empowered IoV. To this end, we propose a Decentralized Reinforcement Learning at the Edge for traffic light control in the IoV (DRLE). DRLE exploits the ubiquity of the IoV to accelerate the collection of traffic data and its interpretation towards alleviating congestion and providing better traffic light control. DRLE operates within the coverage of the edge servers and uses aggregated data from neighboring edge servers to provide city-scale traffic light control. DRLE decomposes the highly complex problem of large area control. into a decentralized multi-agent problem. We prove its global optima with concrete mathematical reasoning. The proposed decentralized reinforcement learning algorithm running at each edge node adapts the traffic lights in real time. We conduct extensive evaluations and demonstrate the superiority of this approach over several state-of-the-art algorithms.