6G White Paper on Machine Learning in Wireless Communication Networks

The focus of this white paper is on machine learning (ML) in wireless communications. 6G wireless communication networks will be the backbone of the digital transformation of societies by providing ubiquitous, reliable, and near-instant wireless connectivity for humans and machines. Recent advances in ML research has led enable a wide range of novel technologies such as self-driving vehicles and voice assistants. Such innovation is possible as a result of the availability of advanced ML models, large datasets, and high computational power. On the other hand, the ever-increasing demand for connectivity will require a lot of innovation in 6G wireless networks, and ML tools will play a major role in solving problems in the wireless domain. In this paper, we provide an overview of the vision of how ML will impact the wireless communication systems. We first give an overview of the ML methods that have the highest potential to be used in wireless networks. Then, we discuss the problems that can be solved by using ML in various layers of the network such as the physical layer, medium access layer, and application layer. Zero-touch optimization of wireless networks using ML is another interesting aspect that is discussed in this paper. Finally, at the end of each section, important research questions that the section aims to answer are presented

Fingerprint-based localization in massive MIMO systems using machine learning and deep learning methods

À mesure que les réseaux de communication sans fil se développent vers la 5G, une énorme quantité de données sera produite et partagée sur la nouvelle plate-forme qui pourra être utilisée pour promouvoir de nouveaux services. Parmis ceux-ci, les informations de localisation des terminaux mobiles (MT) sont remarquablement utiles. Par exemple, les informations de localisation peuvent être utilisées dans différents cas de services d'enquête et d'information, de services communautaires, de suivi personnel, ainsi que de communications sensibles à la localisation. De nos jours, bien que le système de positionnement global (GPS) des MT offre la possibilité de localiser les MT, ses performances sont médiocres dans les zones urbaines où une ligne de vue directe (LoS) aux satellites est bloqué avec de nombreux immeubles de grande hauteur. En outre, le GPS a une consommation d'énergie élevée. Par conséquent, les techniques de localisation utilisant la télémétrie, qui sont basées sur les informations de signal radio reçues des MT tels que le temps d'arrivée (ToA), l'angle d'arrivée (AoA) et la réception de la force du signal (RSS), ne sont pas en mesure de fournir une localisation de précision satisfaisante. Par conséquent, il est particulièrement difficile de fournir des informations de localisation fiables des MT dans des environnements complexes avec diffusion et propagation par trajets multiples. Les méthodes d'apprentissage automatique basées sur les empreintes digitales (FP) sont largement utilisées pour la localisation dans des zones complexes en raison de leur haute fiabilité, rentabilité et précision et elles sont flexibles pour être utilisées dans de nombreux systèmes. Dans les réseaux 5G, en plus d'accueillir plus d'utilisateurs à des débits de données plus élevés avec une meilleure fiabilité tout en consommant moins d'énergie, une localisation de haute précision est également requise. Pour relever un tel défi, des systèmes massifs à entrées multiples et sorties multiples (MIMO) ont été introduits dans la 5G en tant que technologie puissante et potentielle pour non seulement améliorer l'efficacité spectrale et énergétique à l'aide d'un traitement relativement simple, mais également pour fournir les emplacements précis des MT à l'aide d'un très grand nombre d'antennes associées à des fréquences porteuses élevées. Il existe deux types de MIMO massifs (M-MIMO), soit distribué et colocalisé. Ici, nous visons à utiliser la méthode basée sur les FP dans les systèmes M-MIMO pour fournir un système de localisation précis et fiable dans un réseau sans fil 5G. Nous nous concentrons principalement sur les deux extrêmes du paradigme M-MIMO. Un grand réseau d'antennes colocalisé (c'est-à-dire un MIMO massif colocalisé) et un grand réseau d'antennes géographiquement distribué (c'est-à-dire un MIMO massif distribué). Ensuite, nous ex trayons les caractéristiques du signal et du canal à partir du signal reçu dans les systèmes M-MIMO sous forme d'empreintes digitales et proposons des modèles utilisant les FP basés sur le regroupement et la régression pour estimer l'emplacement des MT. Grâce à cette procédure, nous sommes en mesure d'améliorer les performances de localisation de manière significative et de réduire la complexité de calcul de la méthode basée sur les FP.As wireless communication networks are growing into 5G, an enormous amount of data will be produced and shared on the new platform, which can be employed in promoting new services. Location information of mobile terminals (MTs) is remarkably useful among them, which can be used in different use cases of inquiry and information services, community services, personal tracking, as well as location-aware communications. Nowadays, although the Global Positioning System (GPS) offers the possibility to localize MTs, it has poor performance in urban areas where a direct line-of-sight (LoS) to the satellites is blocked by many tall buildings. Besides, GPS has a high power consumption. Consequently, the ranging based localization techniques, which are based on radio signal information received from MTs such as time-of-arrival (ToA), angle-of-arrival (AoA), and received signal strength (RSS), are not able to provide satisfactory localization accuracy. Therefore, it is a notably challenging problem to provide precise and reliable location information of MTs in complex environments with rich scattering and multipath propagation. Fingerprinting (FP)-based machine learning methods are widely used for localization in complex areas due to their high reliability, cost-efficiency, and accuracy and they are flexible to be used in many systems. In 5G networks, besides accommodating more users at higher data rates with better reliability while consuming less power, high accuracy localization is also required in 5G networks. To meet such a challenge, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems have been introduced in 5G as a powerful and potential technology to not only improve spectral and energy efficiency using relatively simple processing but also provide an accurate locations of MTs using a very large number of antennas combined with high carrier frequencies. There are two types of massive MIMO (M-MIMO), distributed and collocated. Here, we aim to use the FP-based method in M-MIMO systems to provide an accurate and reliable localization system in a 5G wireless network. We mainly focus on the two extremes of the M-MIMO paradigm. A large collocated antenna array (i.e., collocated M-MIMO ) and a large geographically distributed antenna array (i.e., distributed M-MIMO). Then, we extract signal and channel features from the received signal in M-MIMO systems as fingerprints and propose FP-based models using clustering and regression to estimate MT's location. Through this procedure, we are able to improve localization performance significantly and reduce the computational complexity of the FP-based method

Systems with Massive Number of Antennas: Distributed Approaches

As 5G is entering maturity, the research interest has shifted towards 6G, and specially the new use cases that the future telecommunication infrastructure needs to support. These new use cases encompass much higher requirements, specifically: higher communication data-rates, larger number of users, higher accuracy in localization, possibility to wirelessly charge devices, among others.The radio access network (RAN) has already gone through an evolution on the path towards 5G. One of the main changes was a large increment of the number of antennas in the base-station. Some of them may even reach 100 elements, in what is commonly referred as Massive MIMO. New proposals for 6G RAN point in the direction of continuing this path of increasing the number of antennas, and locate them throughout a certain area of service. Different technologies have been proposed in this direction, such as: cell-free Massive MIMO, distributed MIMO, and large intelligent surface (LIS). In this thesis we focus on LIS, whose conducted theoretical studies promise the fulfillment of the aforementioned requirements.While the theoretical capabilities of LIS have been conveniently analyzed, little has been done in terms of implementing this type of systems. When the number of antennas grow to hundreds or thousands, there are numerous challenges that need to be solved for a successful implementation. The most critical challenges are the interconnection data-rate and the computational complexity.In the present thesis we introduce the implementation challenges, and show that centralized processing architectures are no longer adequate for this type of systems. We also present different distributed processing architectures and show the benefits of this type of schemes. This work aims at giving a system-design guideline that helps the system designer to make the right decisions when designing these type of systems. For that, we provide algorithms, performance analysis and comparisons, including first order evaluation of the interconnection data-rate, processing latency, memory and energy consumption. These numbers are based on models and available data in the literature. Exact values depend on the selected technology, and will be accurately determined after building and testing these type of systems.The thesis concentrates mostly on the topic of communication, with additional exploration of other areas, such as localization. In case of localization, we benefit from the high spatial resolution of a very-large array that provides very rich channel state information (CSI). A CSI-based fingerprinting via neural network technique is selected for this case with promising results. As the communication and localization services are based on the acquisition of CSI, we foresee a common system architecture capable of supporting both cases. Further work in this direction is recommended, with the possibility of including other applications such as sensing.The obtained results indicate that the implementation of these very-large array systems is feasible, but the challenges are numerous. The proposed solutions provide encouraging results that need to be verified with hardware implementations and real measurements

Predictor Antenna Systems: Exploiting Channel State Information for Vehicle Communications

Vehicle communication is one of the most important use cases in the fifth generation of wireless networks (5G). The growing demand for quality of service (QoS) characterized by performance metrics, such as spectrum efficiency, peak data rate, and outage probability, is mainly limited by inaccurate prediction/estimation of channel state information (CSI) of the rapidly changing environment around moving vehicles. One way to increase the prediction horizon of CSI in order to improve the QoS is deploying predictor antennas (PAs). A PA system consists of two sets of antennas typically mounted on the roof of a vehicle, where the PAs positioned at the front of the vehicle are used to predict the CSI observed by the receive antennas (RAs) that are aligned behind the PAs. In realistic PA systems, however, the actual benefit is affected by a variety of factors, including spatial mismatch, antenna utilization, temporal correlation of scattering environment, and CSI estimation error. This thesis investigates different resource allocation schemes for the PA systems under practical constraints.Comment: Licentiate thesis, Chalmers University of Technolog