Kaushik Chowdhury

Nasim Soltani, Hai Cheng, Mauro Belgiovine et al.

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)-based waveforms are used for communication links in many current and emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications, including the latest WiFi standards. For such OFDM-based transceivers, many core physical layer functions related to channel estimation, demapping, and decoding are implemented for specific choices of channel types and modulation schemes, among others. To decouple hard-wired choices from the receiver chain and thereby enhance the flexibility of IoT deployment in many novel scenarios without changing the underlying hardware, we explore a novel, modular Machine Learning (ML)-based receiver chain design. Here, ML blocks replace the individual processing blocks of an OFDM receiver, and we specifically describe this swapping for the legacy channel estimation, symbol demapping, and decoding blocks with Neural Networks (NNs). A unique aspect of this modular design is providing flexible allocation of processing functions to the legacy or ML blocks, allowing them to interchangeably coexist. Furthermore, we study the implementation cost-benefits of the proposed NNs in resource-constrained IoT devices through pruning and quantization, as well as emulation of these compressed NNs within Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Our evaluations demonstrate that the proposed modular NN-based receiver improves bit error rate of the traditional non-ML receiver by averagely 61% and 10% for the simulated and over-the-air datasets, respectively. We further show complexity-performance tradeoffs by presenting computational complexity comparisons between the traditional algorithms and the proposed compressed NNs.

Mauro Belgiovine, Chris Dick, Kaushik Chowdhury

Airborne Base Stations (ABSs) allow for flexible geographical allocation of network resources with dynamically changing load as well as rapid deployment of alternate connectivity solutions during natural disasters. Since the radio infrastructure is carried by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with limited flight time, it is important to establish the best location for the ABS without exhaustive field trials. This paper proposes a digital twin (DT)-guided approach to achieve this through the following key contributions: (i) Implementation of an interactive software bridge between two open-source DTs such that the same scene is evaluated with high fidelity across NVIDIA's Sionna and Aerial Omniverse Digital Twin (AODT), highlighting the unique features of each of these platforms for this allocation problem, (ii) Design of a back-propagation-based algorithm in Sionna for rapidly converging on the physical location of the UAVs, orientation of the antennas and transmit power to ensure efficient coverage across the swarm of the UAVs, and (iii) numerical evaluation in AODT for large network scenarios (50 UEs, 10 ABS) that identifies the environmental conditions in which there is agreement or divergence of performance results between these twins. Finally, (iv) we propose a resilience mechanism to provide consistent coverage to mission-critical devices and demonstrate a use case for bi-directional flow of information between the two DTs.

Nasim Soltani, Jifan Zhang, Batool Salehi et al.

Collecting an over-the-air wireless communications training dataset for deep learning-based communication tasks is relatively simple. However, labeling the dataset requires expert involvement and domain knowledge, may involve private intellectual properties, and is often computationally and financially expensive. Active learning is an emerging area of research in machine learning that aims to reduce the labeling overhead without accuracy degradation. Active learning algorithms identify the most critical and informative samples in an unlabeled dataset and label only those samples, instead of the complete set. In this paper, we introduce active learning for deep learning applications in wireless communications, and present its different categories. We present a case study of deep learning-based mmWave beam selection, where labeling is performed by a compute-intensive algorithm based on exhaustive search. We evaluate the performance of different active learning algorithms on a publicly available multi-modal dataset with different modalities including image and LiDAR. Our results show that using an active learning algorithm for class-imbalanced datasets can reduce labeling overhead by up to 50% for this dataset while maintaining the same accuracy as classical training.

Mauro Belgiovine, Joshua Groen, Miquel Sirera et al.

Spectrum sharing allows different protocols of the same standard (e.g., 802.11 family) or different standards (e.g., LTE and DVB) to coexist in overlapping frequency bands. As this paradigm continues to spread, wireless systems must also evolve to identify active transmitters and unauthorized waveforms in real time under intentional distortion of preambles, extremely low signal-to-noise ratios and challenging channel conditions. We overcome limitations of correlation-based preamble matching methods in such conditions through the design of T-PRIME: a Transformer-based machine learning approach. T-PRIME learns the structural design of transmitted frames through its attention mechanism, looking at sequence patterns that go beyond the preamble alone. The paper makes three contributions: First, it compares Transformer models and demonstrates their superiority over traditional methods and state-of-the-art neural networks. Second, it rigorously analyzes T-PRIME's real-time feasibility on DeepWave's AIR-T platform. Third, it utilizes an extensive 66 GB dataset of over-the-air (OTA) WiFi transmissions for training, which is released along with the code for community use. Results reveal nearly perfect (i.e. $>98\%$) classification accuracy under simulated scenarios, showing $100\%$ detection improvement over legacy methods in low SNR ranges, $97\%$ classification accuracy for OTA single-protocol transmissions and up to $75\%$ double-protocol classification accuracy in interference scenarios.

Joshua Groen, Simone Di Valerio, Imtiaz Karim et al.

5G and beyond cellular systems embrace the disaggregation of Radio Access Network (RAN) components, exemplified by the evolution of the fronthaul (FH) connection between cellular baseband and radio unit equipment. Crucially, synchronization over the FH is pivotal for reliable 5G services. In recent years, there has been a push to move these links to an Ethernet-based packet network topology, leveraging existing standards and ongoing research for Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN). However, TSN standards, such as Precision Time Protocol (PTP), focus on performance with little to no concern for security. This increases the exposure of the open FH to security risks. Attacks targeting synchronization mechanisms pose significant threats, potentially disrupting 5G networks and impairing connectivity. In this paper, we demonstrate the impact of successful spoofing and replay attacks against PTP synchronization. We show how a spoofing attack is able to cause a production-ready O-RAN and 5G-compliant private cellular base station to catastrophically fail within 2 seconds of the attack, necessitating manual intervention to restore full network operations. To counter this, we design a Machine Learning (ML)-based monitoring solution capable of detecting various malicious attacks with over 97.5% accuracy.

Mauro Belgiovine, Suyash Pradhan, Johannes Lange et al.

Industry adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-native wireless receivers, or even modular, Machine Learning (ML)-aided wireless signal processing blocks, has been slow. The main concern is the lack of explainability of these trained ML models and the significant risks posed to network functionalities in case of failures, especially since (i) testing on every exhaustive case is infeasible and (ii) the data used for model training may not be available. This paper proposes ATLAS, an AI-guided approach that generates a battery of tests for pre-trained AI-native receiver models and benchmarks the performance against a classical receiver architecture. Using gradient-based optimization, it avoids spanning the exhaustive set of all environment and channel conditions; instead, it generates the next test in an online manner to further probe specific configurations that offer the highest risk of failure. We implement and validate our approach by adopting the well-known DeepRx AI-native receiver model as well as a classical receiver using differentiable tensors in NVIDIA's Sionna environment. ATLAS uncovers specific combinations of mobility, channel delay spread, and noise, where fully and partially trained variants of AI-native DeepRx perform suboptimally compared to the classical receivers. Our proposed method reduces the number of tests required per failure found by 19% compared to grid search for a 3-parameters input optimization problem, demonstrating greater efficiency. In contrast, the computational cost of the grid-based approach scales exponentially with the number of variables, making it increasingly impractical for high-dimensional problems.

Nasim Soltani, Michael Loehning, Kaushik Chowdhury

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-native receivers prove significant performance improvement in high noise regimes and can potentially reduce communication overhead compared to the traditional receiver. However, their performance highly depends on the representativeness of the training dataset. A major issue is the uncertainty of whether the training dataset covers all test environments and waveform configurations, and thus, whether the trained model is robust in practical deployment conditions. To this end, we propose a joint measurement-recovery framework for AI-native transceivers post deployment, called VERITAS, that continuously looks for distribution shifts in the received signals and triggers finite re-training spurts. VERITAS monitors the wireless channel using 5G pilots fed to an auxiliary neural network that detects out-of-distribution channel profile, transmitter speed, and delay spread. As soon as such a change is detected, a traditional (reference) receiver is activated, which runs for a period of time in parallel to the AI-native receiver. Finally, VERTIAS compares the bit probabilities of the AI-native and the reference receivers for the same received data inputs, and decides whether or not a retraining process needs to be initiated. Our evaluations reveal that VERITAS can detect changes in the channel profile, transmitter speed, and delay spread with 99%, 97%, and 69% accuracies, respectively, followed by timely initiation of retraining for 86%, 93.3%, and 94.8% of inputs in channel profile, transmitter speed, and delay spread test sets, respectively.

Qiushuo Hou, Matteo Zecchin, Sangwoo Park et al.

In modern wireless network architectures, such as O-RAN, artificial intelligence (AI)-based applications are deployed at intelligent controllers to carry out functionalities like scheduling or power control. The AI "apps" are selected on the basis of contextual information such as network conditions, topology, traffic statistics, and design goals. The mapping between context and AI model parameters is ideally done in a zero-shot fashion via an automatic model selection (AMS) mapping that leverages only contextual information without requiring any current data. This paper introduces a general methodology for the online optimization of AMS mappings. Optimizing an AMS mapping is challenging, as it requires exposure to data collected from many different contexts. Therefore, if carried out online, this initial optimization phase would be extremely time consuming. A possible solution is to leverage a digital twin of the physical system to generate synthetic data from multiple simulated contexts. However, given that the simulator at the digital twin is imperfect, a direct use of simulated data for the optimization of the AMS mapping would yield poor performance when tested in the real system. This paper proposes a novel method for the online optimization of AMS mapping that corrects for the bias of the simulator by means of limited real data collected from the physical system. Experimental results for a graph neural network-based power control app demonstrate the significant advantages of the proposed approach.

Batool Salehi, Utku Demir, Debashri Roy et al.

Creating a digital world that closely mimics the real world with its many complex interactions and outcomes is possible today through advanced emulation software and ubiquitous computing power. Such a software-based emulation of an entity that exists in the real world is called a 'digital twin'. In this paper, we consider a twin of a wireless millimeter-wave band radio that is mounted on a vehicle and show how it speeds up directional beam selection in mobile environments. To achieve this, we go beyond instantiating a single twin and propose the 'Multiverse' paradigm, with several possible digital twins attempting to capture the real world at different levels of fidelity. Towards this goal, this paper describes (i) a decision strategy at the vehicle that determines which twin must be used given the computational and latency limitations, and (ii) a self-learning scheme that uses the Multiverse-guided beam outcomes to enhance DL-based decision-making in the real world over time. Our work is distinguished from prior works as follows: First, we use a publicly available RF dataset collected from an autonomous car for creating different twins. Second, we present a framework with continuous interaction between the real world and Multiverse of twins at the edge, as opposed to a one-time emulation that is completed prior to actual deployment. Results reveal that Multiverse offers up to 79.43% and 85.22% top-10 beam selection accuracy for LOS and NLOS scenarios, respectively. Moreover, we observe 52.72-85.07% improvement in beam selection time compared to 802.11ad standard.

Batool Salehi, Guillem Reus-Muns, Debashri Roy et al.

Beam selection for millimeter-wave links in a vehicular scenario is a challenging problem, as an exhaustive search among all candidate beam pairs cannot be assuredly completed within short contact times. We solve this problem via a novel expediting beam selection by leveraging multimodal data collected from sensors like LiDAR, camera images, and GPS. We propose individual modality and distributed fusion-based deep learning (F-DL) architectures that can execute locally as well as at a mobile edge computing center (MEC), with a study on associated tradeoffs. We also formulate and solve an optimization problem that considers practical beam-searching, MEC processing and sensor-to-MEC data delivery latency overheads for determining the output dimensions of the above F-DL architectures. Results from extensive evaluations conducted on publicly available synthetic and home-grown real-world datasets reveal 95% and 96% improvement in beam selection speed over classical RF-only beam sweeping, respectively. F-DL also outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques by 20-22% in predicting top-10 best beam pairs.

Nasim Soltani, Debashri Roy, Kaushik Chowdhury

In IEEE 802.11 WiFi-based waveforms, the receiver performs coarse time and frequency synchronization using the first field of the preamble known as the legacy short training field (L-STF). The L-STF occupies upto 40% of the preamble length and takes upto 32 us of airtime. With the goal of reducing communication overhead, we propose a modified waveform, where the preamble length is reduced by eliminating the L-STF. To decode this modified waveform, we propose a neural network (NN)-based scheme called PRONTO that performs coarse time and frequency estimations using other preamble fields, specifically the legacy long training field (L-LTF). Our contributions are threefold: (i) We present PRONTO featuring customized convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for packet detection and coarse carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation, along with data augmentation steps for robust training. (ii) We propose a generalized decision flow that makes PRONTO compatible with legacy waveforms that include the standard L-STF. (iii) We validate the outcomes on an over-the-air WiFi dataset from a testbed of software defined radios (SDRs). Our evaluations show that PRONTO can perform packet detection with 100% accuracy, and coarse CFO estimation with errors as small as 3%. We demonstrate that PRONTO provides upto 40% preamble length reduction with no bit error rate (BER) degradation. We further show that PRONTO is able to achieve the same performance in new environments without the need to re-train the CNNs. Finally, we experimentally show the speedup achieved by PRONTO through GPU parallelization over the corresponding CPU-only implementations.

Batool Salehi, Mauro Belgiovine, Sara Garcia Sanchez et al.

Perfect alignment in chosen beam sectors at both transmit- and receive-nodes is required for beamforming in mmWave bands. Current 802.11ad WiFi and emerging 5G cellular standards spend up to several milliseconds exploring different sector combinations to identify the beam pair with the highest SNR. In this paper, we propose a machine learning (ML) approach with two sequential convolutional neural networks (CNN) that uses out-of-band information, in the form of camera images, to (i) rapidly identify the locations of the transmitter and receiver nodes, and then (ii) return the optimal beam pair. We experimentally validate this intriguing concept for indoor settings using the NI 60GHz mmwave transceiver. Our results reveal that our ML approach reduces beamforming related exploration time by 93% under different ambient lighting conditions, with an error of less than 1% compared to the time-intensive deterministic method defined by the current standards.

Zifeng Wang, Batool Salehi, Andrey Gritsenko et al.

We study an Open-World Class Discovery problem in which, given labeled training samples from old classes, we need to discover new classes from unlabeled test samples. There are two critical challenges to addressing this paradigm: (a) transferring knowledge from old to new classes, and (b) incorporating knowledge learned from new classes back to the original model. We propose Class Discovery Kernel Network with Expansion (CD-KNet-Exp), a deep learning framework, which utilizes the Hilbert Schmidt Independence Criterion to bridge supervised and unsupervised information together in a systematic way, such that the learned knowledge from old classes is distilled appropriately for discovering new classes. Compared to competing methods, CD-KNet-Exp shows superior performance on three publicly available benchmark datasets and a challenging real-world radio frequency fingerprinting dataset.

Zifeng Wang, Tong Jian, Kaushik Chowdhury et al.

In lifelong learning, we wish to maintain and update a model (e.g., a neural network classifier) in the presence of new classification tasks that arrive sequentially. In this paper, we propose a learn-prune-share (LPS) algorithm which addresses the challenges of catastrophic forgetting, parsimony, and knowledge reuse simultaneously. LPS splits the network into task-specific partitions via an ADMM-based pruning strategy. This leads to no forgetting, while maintaining parsimony. Moreover, LPS integrates a novel selective knowledge sharing scheme into this ADMM optimization framework. This enables adaptive knowledge sharing in an end-to-end fashion. Comprehensive experimental results on two lifelong learning benchmark datasets and a challenging real-world radio frequency fingerprinting dataset are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our experiments show that LPS consistently outperforms multiple state-of-the-art competitors.

Kunal Sankhe, Mauro Belgiovine, Fan Zhou et al.

This paper describes the architecture and performance of ORACLE, an approach for detecting a unique radio from a large pool of bit-similar devices (same hardware, protocol, physical address, MAC ID) using only IQ samples at the physical layer. ORACLE trains a convolutional neural network (CNN) that balances computational time and accuracy, showing 99\% classification accuracy for a 16-node USRP X310 SDR testbed and an external database of $>$100 COTS WiFi devices. Our work makes the following contributions: (i) it studies the hardware-centric features within the transmitter chain that causes IQ sample variations; (ii) for an idealized static channel environment, it proposes a CNN architecture requiring only raw IQ samples accessible at the front-end, without channel estimation or prior knowledge of the communication protocol; (iii) for dynamic channels, it demonstrates a principled method of feedback-driven transmitter-side modifications that uses channel estimation at the receiver to increase differentiability for the CNN classifier. The key innovation here is to intentionally introduce controlled imperfections on the transmitter side through software directives, while minimizing the change in bit error rate. Unlike previous work that imposes constant environmental conditions, ORACLE adopts the `train once deploy anywhere' paradigm with near-perfect device classification accuracy.