Sara Cavallero

Sara Cavallero, Fabio Saggese, Junya Shiraishi et al.

This paper introduces a dual-mode communication framework for wireless devices that integrates query-driven (pull) and event-driven (push) transmissions within a unified time-frame structure. Devices typically respond to information requests in pull mode, but if an anomaly is detected, they preempt the regular response to report the critical condition. Additionally, push-based communication is used to proactively send critical data without waiting for a request. This adaptive approach ensures timely, context-aware, and efficient data delivery across different network conditions. To achieve high energy efficiency, we incorporate a wake-up radio mechanism and we design a tailored medium access control (MAC) protocol that supports data traffic belonging to the different communication classes. A comprehensive system-level analysis is conducted, accounting for the wake-up control operation and evaluating three key performance metrics: the success probability of anomaly reports (push traffic), the success probability of query responses (pull traffic) and the total energy consumption. Numerical results characterize the system's behavior and highlight the inherent trade-off between push and pull success probabilities as a function of allocated communication resources. Our analysis demonstrates that the proposed approach achieves up to a 42% reduction in energy consumption per served packet compared to traditional approaches, while maintaining reliable support for both communication paradigms.

Francesco Pase, Marco Giordani, Giampaolo Cuozzo et al.

This paper addresses the problem of enabling inter-machine Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) in future 6G Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks. As far as the Radio Access Network (RAN) is concerned, centralized pre-configured resource allocation requires scheduling grants to be disseminated to the User Equipments (UEs) before uplink transmissions, which is not efficient for URLLC, especially in case of flexible/unpredictable traffic. To alleviate this burden, we study a distributed, user-centric scheme based on machine learning in which UEs autonomously select their uplink radio resources without the need to wait for scheduling grants or preconfiguration of connections. Using simulation, we demonstrate that a Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) approach represents a desirable solution to allocate resources with URLLC in mind in an IIoT environment, in case of both periodic and aperiodic traffic, even considering highly populated networks and aggressive traffic.

Francesco Pase, Marco Giordani, Sara Cavallero et al.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks will provide Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) to support critical processes underlying the production chains. However, standard protocols for allocating wireless resources may not optimize the latency-reliability trade-off, especially for uplink communication. For example, centralized grant-based scheduling can ensure almost zero collisions, but introduces delays in the way resources are requested by the User Equipments (UEs) and granted by the gNB. In turn, distributed scheduling (e.g., based on random access), in which UEs autonomously choose the resources for transmission, may lead to potentially many collisions especially when the traffic increases. In this work we propose DIStributed combinatorial NEural linear Thompson Sampling (DISNETS), a novel scheduling framework that combines the best of the two worlds. By leveraging a feedback signal from the gNB and reinforcement learning, the UEs are trained to autonomously optimize their uplink transmissions by selecting the available resources to minimize the number of collisions, without additional message exchange to/from the gNB. DISNETS is a distributed, multi-agent adaptation of the Neural Linear Thompson Sampling (NLTS) algorithm, which has been further extended to admit multiple parallel actions. We demonstrate the superior performance of DISNETS in addressing URLLC in IIoT scenarios compared to other baselines.

Junya Shiraishi, Sara Cavallero, Shashi Raj Pandey et al.

This paper considers energy-efficient connectivity for Internet of Things (IoT) devices in a coexistence scenario between two distinctive communication models: pull- and push-based. In pull-based, the base station (BS) decides when to retrieve a specific type of data from the IoT devices, while in push-based, the IoT device decides when and which data to transmit. To this end, this paper advocates introducing the content-based wake-up (CoWu), which enables the BS to remotely activate only a subset of pull-based nodes equipped with wake-up receivers, observing the relevant data. In this setup, a BS pulls data with CoWu at a specific time instance to fulfill its tasks while collecting data from the nodes operating with a push-based communication model. The resource allocation plays an important role: longer data collection duration for pull-based nodes can lead to high retrieval accuracy while decreasing the probability of data transmission success for push-based nodes, and vice versa. Numerical results show that CoWu can manage communication requirements for both pull-based and push-based nodes while realizing the high energy efficiency (up to 38%) of IoT devices, compared to the baseline scheduling method.