AI Enabled Future Communications: Advanced Computing, Pervasive Networks, 6G, Massive IoT and Intelligent Systems

Dear Colleagues,

The future generation of communication technologies are mainly relying on intelligent systems with advanced infrastructure and computing methods. The advent of sixth generation (6G) networks and beyond 5G promise to support increasingly heterogeneous networking paradigms, and adapt dynamic network environments to provide diversified intelligent services with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this context, the evolutionary technology of artificial intelligence (AI) has already shown its significant impact in the field of wireless communication as smart applications and able to provide effective pervasive network intelligence by integrating the whole network with end users, at network edge, cloud, every facet of the system. Therefore, it is evident that for future communication over 6G networking, corresponding to other aspects of communication such as; resource management, network security, signal processing AI will play important role and explore to overcome the inherent limitations of 5G. In addition to this the required communication for advanced smart IoT based applications, massive IoT will be benefitted with these implementations. The network intelligence is carried out through two different perspectives, by using AI for complex network management or else optimizing the network parameters for AI based applications.

However, the execution of this whole process confronts different challenges. Any smart system with imposed intelligence in the network hinders with distinct QoS requirements in terms of latency, reliability, accuracy, etc. It should also consider the spatial and temporal dynamics for the burst traffic of mobile users. In addition to this the present computational techniques, resources to process the huge amount of data required for AI based applications are not capable to serve the required infrastructure for the proposed future communication scenario. It is evident that the large bandwidth for 5G communication is also not efficient enough for the communication of this amount of data due the network constraints of delay, energy and privacy etc.

In case of on-device learning, the computing techniques also need to contemplate the learning efficiency, speed, accuracy, computational complexity, storage and the cost efficiency for improved services. In that scenario, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) are considered as the key enabler to provide the required storage and computational resources at the edge of the network, enabling intelligent edge by running federation learning and other Machine Learning (ML) techniques such as Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). MEC can be complemented by D2D offloading to improve the overall performance of such systems. Edge and other novel intelligence in pervasive network for future communication technologies able to enhance the performance, optimizing the traffic, and fast services

Therefore, this Special Issue seeks to bring attention of academic and industrial researchers to address the benefits, importance, challenges, and corresponding solutions for implementing AI in 6G and other future communication technologies. Topics include (but not limited to):

-Secure data transmission over the large network

-Novel IoT and communication network protocols

-Wireless network resource management

-Data driven intelligent services

-Privacy, security and robust operation of the network

-Intelligent sensing, learning, and decision making

-Mobile Edge/Fog Computing in 5G-and-beyond and 6G networks

-Network Reliability, complexity and power demand in sensor network for IoT and massive IoT

-AI applications in 6G networks

-Signal processing for AI-enabled communication networks

-Federated Learning over the Edge - model convergence, model sharing, model compression, features fusion, system heterogeneity/Non-i.i.d data

-Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for/via Edge

-Novel Computing - Integration frameworks, Privacy, Security and Efficiency

-Protocols and connectivity in Massive IoT (5G-and-beyond and 6G network)

-Novel Resource Allocation strategies for Ultra Reliable and Low Latency Communication (URLLC).

-Edge Computing for UAVs communication in 6G networks

-New trends in wireless computing

Dr. Amrit Mukherjee

Dr. Pratik Goswami

Guest Editors