Wireless Communications

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27 papers in the last four weeks, up 170% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 259

Jul 7, 2026cs.NI

From Agentic to Autogenic Network Management for AI-Native 6G and Beyond: A Standards Perspective

Standards bodies, including TM Forum, 3GPP, and ETSI, are converging on Agentic AI as the foundation for next-generation network management, where Large AI Model (LAM)-based agents autonomously interpret intent, coordinate resources, and adapt operational behaviors at runtime. However, achieving this vision at the scale and complexity of 6G networks requires management systems that can generate and evolve their own automation software during operation. We introduce Autogenic network management, a reference architecture that extends agentic capabilities with self-programming, self reflection, self-orienting, and self-architecting capabilities. The architecture supports practical staged deployment beginning with human-supervised LAM-based agents and progressing toward autonomous operation as confidence builds. We demonstrate the approach through high-priority operator scenarios drawn from TM Forum's autonomous network use cases, showing how autogenic management addresses real operational challenges. We conclude with a research roadmap outlining the technical advances needed to make autogenic network management realistic in future 6G networks.

Petar Djukic, Sudipta Acharya, Takai Eddine Kennouche +1

Bell Labs Research, 600 March Rd, Kanata, ON K2K 2E6 · University of Ottawa, 350 Legget Drive, Kanata, ON, Canada, K2K 2W7 · Nokia Technology Standards, Nokia France, 12 rue Jean Bart Massy 91300

6G Networks Wireless Communications Agentic AI Self-Evolving Agents

Jul 7, 2026cs.IT

AirPASS: Over-the-Air Federated Learning via Pinching Antenna Systems

This paper investigates over-the-air federated learning (AirFL) in wireless systems where the access point is equipped with a multi-waveguide pinching antenna system (PASS). We adopt the widely studied learning-oriented AirFL formulation, which seeks to maximize the number of selected devices while keeping the aggregation distortion below a prescribed threshold. The resulting joint optimization of device selection, receive beamforming, and pinching-antenna placement is highly nonconvex due to the intricate coupling among these system variables. To address this challenge, we develop AirPASS, an alternating optimization framework with two main components: a homotopy-Riemannian margin-consolidation method for device selection and receive beamforming under fixed PASS configuration, and a homotopy-assisted geometry optimization method for updating the pinching-antenna positions under fixed selected devices and beamformer. Experiments show that AirPASS consistently outperforms conventional co-located MIMO baselines, remains close to ideal FedAvg, and achieves an attractive performance-complexity tradeoff relative to SDR-DC and matching-pursuit scheduling alternatives.

Seyed Mohammad Azimi-Abarghouyi, Christopher G. Brinton

Department of Electrical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden · School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN USA

Federated Learning Aggregation Wireless Communications Over-the-Air Federated Learning Wireless Resource Allocation Federated Learning

Jul 7, 2026cs.IT

6G Sensing Security: Distributed Game-Theoretic RL for Urban Beamforming and Attacker Detection

In next-generation networks, communication systems will no longer be limited to data transmission and will be expected to acquire awareness of the surrounding environment. This leads to the concept of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), where the same wireless infrastructure is used for both communication and environmental sensing. Thus, ISAC enables the system to transmit information efficiently and observe and interpret channel variations and user behavior. Motivated by this capability, this work focuses on detecting an active attacker in an urban environment scenario, where the attacker intentionally manipulates beamforming directions to increase interference and mislead the transmitter into allocating the main lobe of beam toward itself instead of legitimate users. We apply game-theoretic approaches to model the interaction between legitimate users and the attacker, and integrate the resulting utility-based formulation into a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses security challenges in dynamic 6G ISAC systems.

Parmida Geranmayeh, Onur Günlü

Lehrstuhl für Nachrichtentechnik, Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany · †Information Theory and Security Laboratory (ITSL), Linköping University, Sweden

Integrated Sensing and Communication 6G Networks Wireless Communications

Jul 6, 2026eess.SP

Physics-Informed Structure Anchoring With Capture-Aware Prototype Calibration for Cross-Environment RF Fingerprinting

Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) exploits transmitter-specific hardware imperfections as physicallayer identity cues for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, but deep models often degrade across acquisition environments. In multi-antenna reception, antenna topology and frequencyoffset dynamics structure receiver observations, while capturedependent variation distorts target embeddings and misaligns source-trained decision boundaries. This article proposes physicsinformed structure anchoring with capture-aware prototype calibration (PISA-CAPC) to address both representation and decision mismatches. The two stages separate source representation construction from target decision correction. During source training, PISA organizes antenna tokens through a topology-guided graph, conditions propagation on CFO-derived acquisition dynamics, and applies bounded contextual residual suppression to preserve identity evidence. At deployment, unlabeled capture-aware prototype calibration (U-CAPC) estimates capture-local prototypes and recalibrates target decision scores while keeping the representation and source classifier fixed. Thus, calibration uses neither target labels nor target-domain backbone updates. On a measured WiFi benchmark with four receive antennas and ten transmitters, PISA-CAPC achieves a mean target-domain Macro-F1 of 0.9257 under a balanced transductive setting. Component ablations support complementary roles for topology-guided anchoring, CFO-conditioned modulation, reliability-aware token aggregation, contextual suppression, and capture-aware calibration. These results indicate that physically motivated representation learning can be combined with labelfree decision calibration to improve cross-environment RFFI under the evaluated protocol without changing the deployed backbone.

Fengchong Yao, Jianbing Li, Qing Liu +4

School of Information Systems Engineering, Information Engineering University, Zhengzhou 450001, China.

Domain Adaptation Wireless Communications Physics-Informed ML

Jul 5, 2026cs.DC

Air-Plan: Query-Optimized Topology Selection for Over-the-Air Decentralized Federated Learning

Over-the-air (OTA) aggregation exploits the superposition property of wireless multiple-access channels to aggregate model updates from multiple devices within a single transmission slot, significantly reducing communication latency. While OTA computation has been extensively studied for centralized federated learning (FL), its integration with decentralized federated learning (DFL) remains largely unexplored, and principled communication topology selection is absent from existing work. We present AIRPLAN, a query-optimized topology selection framework for Over-the-Air Decentralized Federated Learning (OTA-DFL). AIRPLAN establishes a formal equivalence between OTA-DFL and distributed query processing, enabling topology selection to be formulated as a cost-based query optimization problem. Using privacy-preserving Count-Min Sketch statistics, AIRPLAN estimates workload characteristics, evaluates a graph-aware cost model across candidate topologies, and selects the communication graph that minimizes training cost while satisfying a target accuracy SLA. Experiments across five graph families, three vision benchmarks, four client scales, and multiple SNR settings show that AIRPLAN matches the oracle-optimal topology in 91.4% of workloads while introducing less than 1.8% overhead. We further derive theoretical error bounds for topology-aware sparsification, demonstrating that well-connected topologies better tolerate aggressive compression. AIRPLAN introduces a systems-oriented perspective that bridges wireless federated learning and distributed query optimization.

Kaushal Attaluri, Rebeca P. Diaz-Redondo, Manuel Fernandez Veiga

ICLab, atlanTTic, University of Vigo

Federated Learning Aggregation Wireless Communications Over-the-Air Federated Learning Federated Learning

Jul 5, 2026eess.SP

AI-RAN on NPUs: Baseband Processing Without Baseband Chips

AI-RAN aims to unify artificial intelligence and radio access network workloads on a shared compute substrate. While this paradigm has so far been demonstrated primarily on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), it remains unclear whether Neural Processing Units (NPUs), which are AI accelerators optimized for inference, can also support wireless baseband processing. Here, we provide the first affirmative answer by resolving the fundamental mismatch between baseband workloads and NPU architecture. A computational isomorphism exists: matrix and vector engines NPUs dedicate to inference inherently cover physical-layer operations. Yet NPU architectures are natively shaped for dense-tensor AI inference, not baseband. This architectural mismatch surfaces as opposing optimization objectives: traditional baseband minimizes arithmetic operations, whereas NPU performance demands maximizing engine utilization. We close this gap by reconstructing communication algorithms onto AI compute primitives, prioritizing engine utilization over arithmetic count. We validate this with a complete OFDM transceiver on an Ascend 310B1 edge NPU, demonstrating end-to-end over-the-air transmission via USRP X300 at 3.0 GHz.

Shilong Zhang, Luping Xiang, Jienan Chen +1

State Key Laboratory of Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210008, China · School of Intelligent Software and Engineering, Nanjing University (Suzhou Campus), Suzhou 215163, China · National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China

Wireless Communications

Jul 3, 2026eess.SP

The S-ICDF Dataset: Sionna-Simulated Dynamic Interference Characterization and Direction Finding

Jamming and spoofing threaten wireless and satellite navigation by disrupting or manipulating radio frequency (RF) signals, undermining availability, integrity, and trust. Robust interference monitoring (i.e., detection, classification, characterization, and direction finding) is therefore essential to identify and localize anomalous signals. While machine learning (ML) promises improved performance in complex environments, its development and validation depend on large-scale datasets that capture realistic signal and channel variability. Collecting such data in the real world is difficult because intentional jamming is illegal and ground-truth attribution is confounded by propagation, hardware, and environmental effects. To address this gap, we create and publish S-ICDF, a large-scale indoor interference dataset generated with Sionna, a GPU-accelerated simulation library for physical-layer wireless communications. S-ICDF covers 102 interference configurations, including diverse antenna array patterns, bandwidths, and simulation settings such as noise level and reflection depth. We further provide baseline results by benchmarking S-ICDF with classical estimation and direction finding (DF) methods (MUSIC, ESPRIT, and CAPON) and with modern ML approaches. The dataset is publicly available at: https://gitlab.cc-asp.fraunhofer.de/darcy_gnss/sicdf_dataset

Christian Wielenberg, Lucas Heublein, Jonathan Ott +8

Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, 90411 Nürnberg, Germany

Synthetic Data Generation Direction-of-Arrival Estimation Wireless Communications

Jul 2, 2026cs.IT

Low-Latency Task-Oriented Image Transmission with Opportunistic Spectrum Access

Communication systems designed for reliable data reconstruction, rather than task-oriented communication, typically rely on separate source and channel coding and incur high latency under limited spectrum availability and fading channels. To address this, we propose a transmission framework with opportunistic spectrum access, in which the transmitter sends discrete latent representations learned via a vector-quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) over idle licensed channels using standard digital modulation. The AI-powered receiver is still able to reconstruct task-related information from the heavily compressed data. We develop a cross-layer latency model that accounts for compression, block errors, retransmissions, and stochastic channel access. Results on latency-accuracy trade-offs show that the proposed scheme achieves at least 79- and 3.3-fold latency reductions with only 5.7% and 2.4% drops in classification accuracy compared to benchmarks using conventional source and channel coding. The framework enables low-latency communication and reliable task execution even under limited spectrum availability and challenging channel conditions.

João Henrique Inacio de Souza, Mattia Merluzzi, Mateus P. Mota +2

Department of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark. · CEA-Leti, Université Grenoble Alpes, F-38000 Grenoble, France. · Telecommunications Research Institute, Universidad de Málaga, Málaga, Spain.

Semantic Communication Wireless Communications

Jul 2, 2026eess.SP

Scene-Conditioned PINN-GNN for Multipath RF Maps: Cross-Scene Generation and In-Scene Completion

Radio frequency (RF) maps provide a compact representation of multipath propagation characteristics and are fundamental to channel modeling, coverage analysis, and environment-aware wireless optimization. This paper proposes a unified RF map construction framework based on a physics-informed neural network (PINN) and a graph neural network (GNN), supporting both cross-scene generation and in-scene completion with 2D and 2.5D environmental representations. The PINN embeds electromagnetic propagation constraints to establish a physically consistent mapping from receiver locations to multipath parameters, including path gain, time of arrival, and angles, while the GNN enforces spatial consistency by modeling correlations among neighboring receivers. To comprehensively evaluate multipath reconstruction quality, we propose a peak-weighted dynamic time warping metric that jointly accounts for amplitude errors and peak delay misalignment in channel impulse responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms image-based, diffusion-based, and interpolation baselines across both map-level and multipath-level metrics, achieving robust generalization and high-fidelity RF map construction under sparse observations.

Lizhou Liu, Xiaohui Chen, Zihan Tang +2

Department of Electronic Engineering and Information Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China · Wireless Technology Lab, Huawei, Shenzhen 518129, China

Wireless Communications Radio Propagation Modeling

Jul 1, 2026cs.IT

QuaMoE-DRF: Proactive Beam and Rate Adaptation via Multimodal Dynamic Radio Map Forecasting in ISAC Networks

Static radio maps provide location-dependent propagation priors, but they cannot capture short-term blockage caused by moving objects. Direct sensing-assisted beam prediction is also limited because a beam index discards SINR margins, MCS thresholds, BS alternatives, and communication-equivalent neighboring beams. This paper proposes QuaMoE-DRF, a quality-aware multimodal dynamic radio map forecasting framework for proactive beam and rate adaptation in ISAC networks. Its core representation is a future beam-SINR field. We show that the full multi-BS beam-SINR field is sufficient for finite-codebook threshold-rate BS, beam, MCS, goodput, and outage decisions. For tractability, the implemented model learns a compact reference-BS local field, complemented by BS-level supervision, joint BS--beam supervision, and latent network context; we also clarify that this compact projection alone is not sufficient for BS association. QuaMoE-DRF fuses static geometry, event-like motion observations, structured sensing states, and wireless history through a quality-aware mixture-of-experts module motivated by inverse-variance fusion under heteroscedastic modality errors. It jointly predicts communication-oriented map channels and proactive BS, beam, and MCS decisions. On a dynamic multi-BS and multi-UE urban benchmark, QuaMoE-DRF achieves 402.5 Mbps effective rate, 0.0417 outage probability, and 0.1836 map RMSE, improving the effective rate by 5.67% and reducing outage by 8.35% over the strongest completed effective-rate baseline. The current validation uses labels from a compact blockage/path-loss simulator, with ray tracing used only for calibration and sanity checking.

Zhihan Zeng, Kaihe Wang, Zhongpei Zhang +1

National Key Laboratory of Wireless Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China · College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China +2

Integrated Sensing and Communication Wireless Communications Radio Propagation Modeling Wireless Resource Allocation Spatiotemporal Forecasting Multimodal Fusion

Jul 1, 2026cs.CV

Geometry-Aware Cross-Height Channel Knowledge Map Prediction for UAV-Assisted Communications With Uncertainty-Guided 3D Sensing

Low-altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) often need to infer channel knowledge across a range of heights from only sparse observations collected at a few altitude layers. To address this challenge, this paper studies height-conditioned cross-height channel knowledge map (CKM) prediction for UAV-assisted communications in geometry-rich urban environments. We develop a geometry-aware conditional prediction framework that combines urban scene priors, sparse multi-altitude observations, and target-height descriptors to reconstruct dense CKMs at unobserved target heights. An uncertainty head is further introduced to characterize prediction confidence and to support cost-aware online UAV sensing under motion and safety constraints. Experiments on a layered aerial CKM benchmark show that the proposed Feature Pyramid Network (FPN)-Transformer achieves the best overall performance under both unseen-scene zero-shot and legacy patch-random protocols, reducing the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) to 5.347dB and 1.111dB, respectively, compared with 6.937dB and 1.221dB for the strongest baseline 3D-RadioDiff. Moreover, after applying our unseen-scene few-shot adaptation, the RMSE further decreases from 5.347dB in zero-shot prediction to 3.518dB with 10-shot two-height support, while the uncertainty-guided cost-aware sensing policy improves active reconstruction from 6.94dB at initialization to 4.79dB at sensing budget 40, outperforming uncertainty-only sensing at 5.08dB and random aerial sampling at 5.84dB.

Zhihan Zeng, Amir Hussain, Yue Xiu +4

National Key Laboratory of Wireless Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), Chengdu 611731, China · SDAIA-KFUPM Joint Research Centre of AI, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia · School of Science, Technology and Engineering, University of the Sunshine Coast, Moreton Bay Campus, Petrie, QLD 4502, Australia +3

Active Sensing Wireless Communications

Jul 1, 2026eess.SP

Meta-Transfer Learning for mmWave Beam Alignment

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) beam alignment is critical for next-generation wireless systems, but existing approaches either update all parameters during adaptation or restrict updates to a subset of layers without adapting intermediate feature representations. We propose MTL-BA, a meta-transfer learning framework for multiple-input single-output (MISO) beam alignment that freezes a pre-trained convolutional backbone and meta-learns lightweight Scale-and-Shift (SS) adapters and a classifier head. Under an outdoor-to-indoor shift in DeepMIMO, MTL-BA achieves the highest Top-1 accuracy among the evaluated methods at 35 dB while updating

17\times

fewer parameters than full fine-tuning and meta-training

6\times

faster than MAML.

Ahmet Nuri Cevik, Sinem Coleri

Meta-Learning Wireless Communications Cross-Domain Transfer Learning Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Jun 30, 2026eess.SP

Minimizing Quantized Semantic Age of Information (QSAoI) in Foundation Model-Based Semantic Communications

The emerging techniques of semantic communications and edge computing in 6G networks necessitate a paradigm shift toward co-designed semantic-aware and adaptive resource allocation for short-packet transmissions. However, there is a fundamental gap between the semantic layer and the physical layer under low-latency finite blocklength (FBL) effects. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Quantized Semantic Age of Information (QSAoI), a novel metric that rigorously captures the trade-offs among freshness and semantic efficiency of high-level features in real-time communication in the FBL regime. Guided by this metric, we propose a novel foundation model-based efficient co-designed framework to minimize the expected QSAoI over wireless fading channels in latency-constrained semantic communication. Specifically, we formulate a non-linear joint optimization problem to dynamically optimize the block-wise mixed-precision quantization (MPQ) strategy and the physical blocklength. To efficiently resolve this complex problem, we develop a high-efficiency low-complexity algorithm based on fixpoint inspection and bisection search. Extensive simulations validate that our proposed algorithm dynamically adapts the semantic quantization precision to varying channel conditions, effectively minimizing the expected QSAoI compared to baselines.

Huanyu Zhang, Yulin Hu, Xiaopeng Yuan +2

INDA Chair, RWTH Aachen University, Germany · School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, China · Department of Digital Communication Systems, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany

Mixed-Precision Quantization Semantic Communication Age of Information Wireless Communications Wireless Resource Allocation

Jun 30, 2026cs.IT

Active Sensing for RIS-Aided Tracking and Power Control: A Hybrid Neuroevolution and Supervised Learning Approach

This paper studies energy efficient tracking of power-limited mobile users with the assistance of a Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS). Since localization pilot transmissions dominate the energy budget of power-constrained devices, we introduce a low-overhead feedback link from the Base Station (BS) to the user to enable dynamic uplink power control. To navigate the discrete and decentralized nature of this active sensing problem, we propose a novel Dual-Agent (DA) deep learning framework that jointly optimizes the discrete RIS phase profiles and the UE's transmit power in real time. Specifically, our approach employs a hybrid training methodology integrating the neuroevolution paradigm with supervised learning, effectively overcoming the non-differentiability of discrete phase responses from the RIS unit elements and the strict information bottleneck of single-bit feedback messages for pilot power control. The proposed DA active sensing framework can be applied with both single- and multi-antenna BSs, the latter with only minor modifications in the structure of one NN: an additional output branch with appropriate structure is included for the latter case to select a valid digital combiner from a finite set. Extensive numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves highly accurate and robust tracking across diverse target motion models, outperforming extended Kalman and particle filters, as well as, machine learning-based trackers. Furthermore, in static localization, it is shown to significantly outperform traditional fingerprinting schemes, deep reinforcement learning baselines, and standard backpropagation-based estimators.

George Stamatelis, Hui Chen, Henk Henk Wymeersch +1

Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Panepistimiopolis Ilissia, 16122 Athens, Greece · Department of Electrical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 58 Gothenburg, Sweden

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces Active Sensing Wireless Communications Wireless Localization Wireless Resource Allocation Neuroevolution

Jun 30, 2026eess.SP

Cross-Receiver Open-Set Radio Frequency Fingerprinting via Structure-First Adaptation

Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) provides a critical physical-layer security mechanism for dynamic Internet of Things (IoT) and ad hoc networks. However, the decentralized and open nature of these networks imposes two strict deployment criteria: the credential must transfer reliably across physically dispersed, heterogeneous receivers, and it must decisively reject unregistered rogue traffic. Cross-receiver hardware shifts depress the confidence of registered devices and may also place unseen rogue transmitters in high-confidence known regions under naive domain adaptation, increasing false acceptance. To address these risks, we propose CRODA-ST, a joint optimization framework that couples Discriminative Structure Anchoring (DSA) with Rejection Oriented Alignment (ROA). Within this coupled objective, DSA establishes a stable target-known semantic foundation for shifted registered devices, while ROA regularizes the open-set decision boundaries governing rejection of unseen rogue transmitters. In the canonical WiSig setting, CRODA-ST achieves an open-set classification rate (OSCR) of 0.9580 and a target-domain false positive rate of 0.0469 at a 90% true positive rate (FPR90). A controllable LoRa simulation provides a complementary diagnostic under synthesized hardware distortions. At the distinct source-calibrated deployment operating point with rho = 0.80, CRODA-ST yields a target-unknown false acceptance rate (FAR) of 0.0075 in the evaluated setting.

Fengchong Yao, Jianbing Li, Qing Liu +4

School of Information Systems Engineering, Information Engineering University, Zhengzhou, 450001, China

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Domain Adaptation Open-Set Recognition Wireless Communications

Jun 29, 2026cs.NI

Wireless Backdoor Attack and Defense for Semantic Communications over Multiple Access Channel

Semantic communication (SemCom) aims to preserve semantic meaning and task-oriented information beyond conventional message recovery over wireless channels. The adoption of SemCom in shared-access wireless networks introduces new vulnerabilities for multi-user semantic inference. This paper considers a SemCom system for two transmitters communicating with a common receiver over a multiple access channel. Each transmitter maps source information into latent semantic representations, while the receiver jointly reconstructs and classifies the semantic information for both transmitters. A selective over-the-air backdoor (Trojan) attack is presented in which an adversary transmits a low-power trigger waveform over the air and injects it into the shared received signal during training. By transmitting the trigger again during testing, this stealthy, low-power attack selectively manipulates the semantic inference for one transmitter while minimally affecting the inference of the other transmitter. To mitigate this vulnerability, a trigger-aware defense mechanism is developed to preserve correct semantic labels under trigger-contaminated wireless observations. The results demonstrate both the vulnerability of shared-access SemCom systems to selective over-the-air backdoor attacks and the effectiveness of trigger-aware robust training for semantic protection.

Yalin E. Sagduyu, Tugba Erpek, Aylin Yener +1

Nexcepta, Gaithersburg, MD, USA · The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA · University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

Backdoor Attacks Semantic Communication Backdoor Defense Wireless Communications

Jun 28, 2026cs.LG

Deciphering Region-Level Signatures from Latency Measurements in LEO Satellite Internet

Low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite Internet has become an indispensable infrastructure that provide growing coverage for global users. Despite extensive measurement efforts, the principles underlying region-level performance characteristics remain insufficiently understood, limiting the ability to identify region-specific latency signatures under dynamic network conditions. In this paper, we formulate the problem of region-level latency characterization using Starlink round-trip time (RTT) measurements from the public LENS dataset. We then propose a hierarchical analytical framework that transforms raw RTT sequences into multi-scale statistical features for cross-region comparison. Using data from five geographically representative regions, we demonstrate that latency differences are strongly associated with deployment factors, particularly infrastructure availability and Starlink dish-to-Point-of-Presence distance. Mutual information analysis identifies minimum RTT as the most discriminative feature, which is further supported by XGBoost-based feature importance. The proposed model well achieves 83% accuracy on short-term data. However, its performance degrades over longer periods, indicating limited temporal generalization and motivating the need for adaptive models and feature representations for long-term performance in the future.

Xiang Shi, Yifei Zhang, Peng Hu

Advanced Network and Embedded Systems Lab (AEL), Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada

Wireless Communications LEO Satellite Networks

Jun 27, 2026cs.IT

Brownian Bridge Diffusion-Based Joint Channel Estimation and Data Detection for Jamming-Resilient Receivers

In next-generation wireless networks, the growing density of devices and limited spectrum resources pose severe jamming challenges to fragile legitimate communication links in the wireless electromagnetic environment. Crucially, when jamming overlaps with pilot and data symbols in both time and frequency domains, it inflicts a severe bottleneck on receiver-side joint estimation and detection. Existing schemes often lack an effective framework to combat such jamming contamination, thereby failing to guarantee reliable transmission. To address this issue, we propose a Brownian bridge diffusion-based joint channel estimation and data detection framework (BBD-JCED) for jamming-resilient receivers. Specifically, the proposed framework comprises two core modules: the first extracts jamming features in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) domain and suppresses jamming samples, thereby improving the signal-to-jamming-plus-noise ratio (SJNR) of the received signal; the second introduces a Brownian bridge diffusion (BBD) process to model the evolution of the suppressed signal and the encoded bits in the presence of channel estimation errors, thereby enabling enhanced joint channel estimation and data detection. To alleviate the computational burden of the BBD process in the second module, we further derive a fast ordinary differential equation (ODE) solver that enables its low-complexity iterative evolution. Finally, we design a multi-module training algorithm to improve the data recovery capability of the proposed framework. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves superior bit recovery performance compared with baseline schemes while maintaining a lower number of model parameters and competitive computational complexity.

Honghan She, Yufan Cheng, Tieming Sun +3

National Key Laboratory of Wireless Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China

Wireless Communications Channel Estimation Diffusion Models

Jun 26, 2026cs.IT

Contrastive Predictive Coding with Compression for Enhanced Channel State Feedback in Wireless Networks

Accurate and timely channel state information (CSI) is essential for next-generation wireless systems, yet existing works treat CSI compression and CSI prediction as separate problems, both in academia and in current 3GPP studies. Consequently, channel aging remains insufficiently addressed within standardized CSI feedback pipelines. In this article, we propose a unified compression-prediction framework that integrates Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC) directly into the 3GPP-compliant CSI compression architecture. Instead of predicting high-dimensional CSI matrices, our approach forecasts future latent representations and jointly optimizes reconstruction fidelity and temporal predictive coherence via a combined 1-SGCS and InfoNCE objective. This design enables temporal representation learning without increasing feedback overhead. We present two variants: CPC-before-Compression, which performs autoregressive modeling on encoded features prior to quantization, and CPC-after-Compression, which shifts temporal modeling to the base-station to reduce the complexity of users' devices. Evaluations on 3GPP-compliant datasets from Nokia, Oppo, and CATT show that CPC-before-Compression achieves over 90% reconstruction accuracy with 32x lower decoder GFLOPs than the 3GPP baseline, while CPC-after-Compression preserves an identical encoder footprint and the same 64-bit feedback overhead. By unifying compression and prediction within a standardized pipeline, the proposed framework provides an age-aware, computationally efficient CSI feedback solution. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/AhmedRadwan02/cpc-3gpp

Ahmed Y. Radwan, Fahad Syed Muhammad, Matthew Baker +1

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, York University, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada · Nokia Networks, 12 rue Jean Bart, Paris-Saclay, Massy, 91300, France · Nokia UK, Broers Building, 21 JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 0FA, United Kingdom

Wireless Communications Predictive Representation Learning

Jun 26, 2026cs.CV

Multi-Modal Conditioned High-Resolution Transformer for Urban Electromagnetic Field Map Prediction Download PDF

Predicting electromagnetic field (EMF) strength in urban environments is essential for cellular network planning but computationally expensive with physics-based simulators. We propose a multi-conditioned dense prediction framework that generates 500 500 EMF maps from building layout images and antenna configurations. Our architecture uses a High-Resolution Transformer (HRFormer) backbone with two complementary conditioning mechanisms: Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) injects scalar antenna parameters into all backbone stages, while cross-attention fuses 1-D radiation pattern tokens with spatial features at the deepest stage. We further introduce transmitter-relative spatial channels encoding distance, proximity, and bearing from the antenna, enabling coordinate-consistent test-time augmentation (TTA) that reduces test MAE by 6.3%. To address the prediction difficulty imbalance across EMF maps, we design a composite loss combining masked L1, multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM), and a focal L1 term that upweights high-signal pixels, outperforming individual loss components in all metrics. Our best model achieves a test MAE of 0.0461, a 25.2% improvement over a plain UNet baseline and 31.8% over an HRFormer-only baseline.Do-

Do-Eon Kim, Dongryul Park, Seungyoung Ahn +3

Soongsil University, Seoul 06978, Republic of Korea · Cho Chun Shik Graduate School of Mobility, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 34051, Republic of Korea · Department of Intelligent Semiconductors, Soongsil University, Seoul 06978, Republic of Korea

Transformer Wireless Communications Radio Propagation Modeling Multimodal Fusion

Jun 25, 2026cs.CV

RIS-Assisted Proactive Handover for Reliable mmWave Wireless Networks

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) networks are highly susceptible to line-of-sight (LoS) blockages. Vision-aided wireless communications (VAWC) enable proactive handovers (PHO) to mitigate such blockages; however, PHO becomes challenging when no nearby base station (BS) is available. In such cases, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) can be used to restore connectivity. To ensure timely PHO, the RIS configuration time must be taken into account, as the large number of RIS elements can limit responsiveness in time-sensitive scenarios. This work proposes a novel RIS-assisted PHO approach that optimizes the number of allocated RIS elements to balance signal processing complexity and link quality under handover timing constraints, making the RIS-assisted link more energy-efficient. An optimization problem based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is formulated to determine the optimal end-to-end RIS link setup that runs offline to bypass latency constraints. Results show that reducing the number of RIS elements by 12% leads to a 10% decrease in dissipated energy without compromising the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Moreover, the RIS-assisted link achieves a 15--30 dB improvement in blocked regions while maintaining accurate PHO timing.

Alaa Adnan, Mohammad Al-Quraan, Ahmed Zoha +5

James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK · Nokia Standards, USA · KU 6G Research Center, Department of Computer and Communication Engineering, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi 127788, UAE +3

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces Wireless Communications Wireless Resource Allocation

Jun 23, 2026cs.AI

Agentic AI for Bilevel Long-Term Optimization of Policy-Driven Physical Layer Systems

Network operators' changing policies, service requirements, and stringent real-time constraints render existing methods designed with fixed objectives and constraints ineffective. This paper presents Agentic long-term performance optimization (Agentic-LTPO), a nested bilevel optimization framework that can be applied to adaptive physical layer problem configuration. The key idea is to employ agentic AI to generate upper-level configurations in a bilevel optimization structure, where evolving operator policies, environment summaries, and historical experiences are translated into structured lower-level optimization problem configurations. The lower level solves the problems with updated configurations for real-time physical-layer decisions. Considering cell-free MIMO beamforming as a use case, we embody Agentic-LTPO by designing a new multi-agent decision process with retrieval-augmented experience-based verification in the upper level, together with a closed-form beamformer in the lower level. Experiments demonstrate that Agentic-LTPO exhibits strong adaptability to dynamic operator policies and effectively enhances the system's long-term performance by 57.2% compared to traditional methods.

Bingnan Xiao, Chenhao Yang, Wei Ni +2

Key Laboratory of EMW Information (MoE), College of Future Information Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China · James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, U.K. · School of Engineering, Edith Cowan University, Perth, WA 6027, Australia +1

Wireless Communications Bilevel Optimization

Jun 22, 2026eess.SP

Integrated Sensing and Communications for Real-time Avatar Control in XR over 5G

Extended Reality (XR) presents a challenging use case for 5G and 6G networks, requiring high data-rates and lowlatency communication to deliver a truly immersive experience. Moreover, in order to seamlessly translate physical actions to the virtual world, accurate gesture recognition and pose estimation are required. Current XR interaction solutions based on handheld controllers and cameras cannot easily capture full-body poses, inhibit the free use of hands, and require good visibility and a clear line of sight. In this work, we propose a multimodal sensing architecture for XR that combines 5G MillimeterWave (mmWave) Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) and surface electromyography (sEMG) signals. 5G mmWave ISAC cannot only be used to deliver content wirelessly to the Head-mounted display (HMD), but also the same communication signals can be used to derive coarse body-level gestures and poses of the user, to support real-time avatar control. For fine-grained finger-level gestures, our architecture leverages lightweight sEMG sensors that capture forearm muscle activity. To illustrate the need of both modalities, we present evaluations of both sensing technologies. At the body level (5G), our architecture relies on power-per-beam-pair (PPBP), which can be computed from standard beam management or beam sweeping procedures of the 5G NR standard. PPBP-based sensing achieves 82.2

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5.9% average accuracy when evaluated on users not seen during training. For fine-grained finger-level interactions, we show that surface electromyography (sEMG) carries strong discriminative information achieving consistent promising performance across different movement settings. Thus, combining the two modalities enables multi-scale gesture recognition, at the body level via existing 5G signals and finger level via lightweight sEMG sensors, forming a complete XR framework.

Nabeel Nisar Bhat, Javad Sameri, Rreze Halili +3

IDLab, University of Antwerp - imec, Antwerp, Belgium · IDLab, Ghent University - imec, Ghent, Belgium · Light and Lighting Technology Lab, KU Leuven, Ghent, Belgium

Integrated Sensing and Communication Wireless Communications Gesture Recognition Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jun 22, 2026eess.SP

AI-Empowered UAV-Assisted Backscatter Localization and ISAC for Zero-Energy IoT: A Comprehensive Survey

Zero-energy Internet of Things (IoT) enables passive or near-passive devices to operate on harvested energy rather than batteries. Backscatter communication (BackCom) supports this vision by enabling tags to transmit data via reflection and modulation of incident RF signals, but it suffers from weak reflections, double-path loss, limited coverage, direct-link interference, and dependence on external RF sources. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can mitigate these limitations by acting as mobile carrier emitters, data collectors, relays, aerial receivers, mobile anchors, sensing platforms, and edge-intelligence nodes. Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) further enables the sharing of wireless resources for data transmission, localization, target sensing, and environmental awareness. This article surveys RF-based AI-empowered UAV-assisted backscatter localization and ISAC for zero-energy IoT. It reviews enabling technologies, presents a structured PRISMA-informed methodology, and develops a unified taxonomy covering network architectures, UAV roles, backscatter modes, RF sources, localization and sensing functions, AI techniques, and performance metrics. It also discusses UAV-assisted BackCom, passive localization, ISAC-enabled UAV-backscatter systems, and AI-driven optimization through comparative tables, quantitative trend analysis, coverage evaluation, and tutorial-style numerical illustrations. Finally, it identifies open challenges and future directions in realistic channel modeling, energy-neutral operation, benchmarking, reproducibility, scalable and trustworthy AI, security, privacy, hardware validation, and integration with RIS, MEC, digital twins, and 6G technologies.

Ruhul Amin Khalil

Engineering Requirements Unit (ERU), College of Engineering, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain 15551, UAE

Integrated Sensing and Communication Internet of Things Wireless Communications

Jun 22, 2026eess.SP

LOLLA: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Closed-Loop Link Adaptation Towards a GPU-Accelerated AI-RAN

Outer-loop link adaptation (OLLA) is widely deployed in 5G NR to track channel variations, yet its reliance on first-order, single-bit feedback degrades performance significantly under high-mobility and fast-varying channels. This paper presents LOLLA (Learned Outer-Loop Link Adaptation), a deep reinforcement learning framework that replaces the conventional OLLA staircase with a learned, continuous SINR offset conditioned on rich PHY/MAC telemetry inaccessible to OLLA. The offset modulates the SINR-to-MCS lookup table, preserving 3GPP-compliant MCS selection and provably subsuming the conventional OLLA update rule. A Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) policy trained under a Lagrangian block error rate (BLER) constraint automatically enforces tunable reliability targets from 1% to 15% without manual penalty calibration. The framework is realized as the first closed-loop AI-native control dApp on a GPU-accelerated 5G NR stack, achieving end-to-end control latencies under 500 microseconds. Evaluations under 3GPP TDL channel models demonstrate 15% to 92% throughput gains over OLLA across Doppler frequencies up to 400 Hz, while attaining a Pareto frontier that strictly dominates OLLA across all evaluated reliability targets. The learned policy generalizes to unseen channel models and scales to eight concurrent UEs under shared-resource scheduling. In the uplink formulation, the gNB directly observes decoding outcomes, enabling simulation-to-deployment parity.

Rui Wang, Linchao Zhang, Qiang Liu +1

RL Control Wireless Communications

Jun 22, 2026cs.CR

CITADEL: CSI-Based Jamming Detection and Open-Set Classification for IIoT Networks

Radio frequency jamming poses a critical threat to the availability of wireless Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks. Existing detection and classification techniques are poorly suited to this setting: coarse signal-strength and cross-layer features lack information richness, while raw I/Q baseband approaches require hardware and throughput that is impractical at the scale of hundred-node IIoT deployments. This paper presents CITADEL, a lightweight two-stage hierarchical pipeline that uses only Channel State Information (CSI) measurements, which are natively available on commodity IIoT devices, to detect and classify jamming attacks including previously unseen ones. While prior work has shown that jamming leaves observable CSI signatures, CITADEL is the first system to translate this insight into an end-to-end pipeline that jointly achieves closed-set classification of known attacks, open-set detection of zero-day attacks, and resistance to adversarial evasion. Evaluated across 6 known attack types and 15 zero-day scenarios, CITADEL achieves 100% known-attack detection and 97.1% zero-day detection at a 0.4% end-to-end false positive rate. Under adversarial evaluation spanning white-box and black-box threat models, gradient-based evasion remains below 2% across all tested perturbation budgets and the strongest published CSI attack generator achieves less than 5% average evasion. A systematic comparison against eight baselines confirms that no existing method achieves comparable performance on CSI data across all three axes: detection, generalization, and robustness. The full pipeline completes inference in 14.2 ms at 95.9 mJ on an edge GPU, establishing CITADEL as a practical solution for large-scale IIoT network security.

Aymen Bouferroum, Ildi Alla, Valeria Loscri +2

FUN · Inria Lille-Nord Europe, Lille, France · uni.lu +3

Adversarial Robustness Internet of Things Open-Set Recognition Wireless Communications

Jun 22, 2026cs.RO

Memory-Native Non-Terrestrial Networks for Embodied Intelligence

Non-terrestrial networks (NTN) provide ubiquitous connectivity for embodied intelligence (EI), enabling robots in wilderness to leverage cloud resources or report critical information to remote centers. However, the synergy is nontrivial due to the highly-dynamic, resource-constrained, topology-varying, and task-oriented environment. Existing memoryless NTN protocols become inefficient, since the decisions are driven by local channel conditions and instantaneous service demands. To address these limitations, this paper proposes the memory-native NTN (MemNTN) paradigm that leverages long-horizon contexts for memory augmented system optimization. To realize this paradigm shift, we establish a dual-memory architecture that distinguishes between physical memory representing the state of the world and digital memory encoding historical network experience. We develop memory acquisition, compression, valuation, update, and utilization mechanisms that facilitate cross-layer, memory-native decision-making, spanning from the physical and access layers up to the network and application layers. Experiments in satellite embodied question answering (SEQA) demonstrate that the proposed MemNTN significantly outperforms conventional stateless NTN and terrestrial approaches.

Chengyang Li, Yikun Wang, Jiahui He +6

The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China · Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China · Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China +2

Wireless Communications Wireless Resource Allocation Embodied AI

Jun 20, 2026cs.CV

Resolving Multi-Target Association in OFDM-based ISAC via Vision-aided Multi-Modal Learning

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems commonly extract target parameters by peak-searching a delay-Doppler map (DDM) constructed from reflected pilots. In multi-target scenarios, this results in ambiguity: the DDM does not reveal which physical target produced which peak, and two targets within the same delay-Doppler resolution cell cannot be separated. We propose a vision-assisted OFDM-ISAC framework that resolves both limitations by fusing wireless and visual modalities. The transmitter encodes an onboard street-view image with deep joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) and transmits it over the same OFDM waveform used for sensing; the receiver reconstructs the image, runs a fine-tuned YOLOv5 detector and fuses the resulting per-target features (bounding-box coordinates and class labels) with the DDM and transmitter-receiver geometry through a learned multi-modal network. To stabilize training of the high dimensional delay and Doppler classifiers, we introduce a Kullback Leibler loss against triangular soft labels centered on the ground-truth bin. On a Blender-rendered vehicular testbed, the proposed framework achieves a 16 cm localization root mean square error (RMSE) and a 10.8 ns delay RMSE. An ablation study confirms that removing the visual modality causes a 60x degradation in localization. These results highlight the potential of vision to overcome the data-association and resolution limits of single-modality ISAC.

Meng Hua, Chenghong Bian, Deniz Gunduz

Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, U.K. · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong.

Integrated Sensing and Communication Wireless Communications Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jun 20, 2026cs.NI

From RAN Control to Agentic Intelligence: Architecture and Vision for Energy Efficient AI-RAN

Future 6G networks will rely on highly distributed, AI-native Radio Access Networks (RANs), where communication and AI workloads share a common infrastructure. This evolution, combined with increasing deployment density and continuous AI processing, is expected to significantly increase RAN energy consumption. While Open RAN (O-RAN) introduces a programmable and modular control framework through the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) and Service Management and Orchestration (SMO), current approaches remain largely policy-driven, limiting adaptive energy-aware coordination across multiple applications. In parallel, AI-RAN promotes the convergence of AI and RAN infrastructures through AI-for-RAN, AI-on-RAN, and AI-and-RAN paradigms, yet efficient mechanisms to jointly orchestrate performance, latency, and energy remain an open challenge. This article proposes an agentic AI-native RAN architecture that bridges O-RAN's structured control with AI-RAN's unified vision. Leveraging semantic intent abstraction and Large Language Model (LLM)-driven coordination, the framework enables adaptive orchestration, conflict resolution, and energy-aware multi-objective optimization across heterogeneous workloads. Through representative AI-for-RAN and AI-on-RAN use cases, we show how such coordination can improve resource efficiency and reduce operational energy consumption, paving the way toward sustainable 6G networks.

Sabrine Aroua, Alexis I. Aravanis, Ilias Chatzistefanidis +7

Ericsson Research, France · Laboratory of Signals and Systems (L2S), Universite Paris-Saclay, CentraleSupelec, CNRS, France · BubbleRAN, France +1

LLM Agent Orchestration Wireless Communications Open Radio Access Network

Jun 18, 2026cs.AI

TelcoAgent: A Scalable 5G Multi-KPM Forecasting With 3GPP-Grounded Explainability

Key Performance Measurement (KPM) forecasting is essential for proactive network management of 5G and next-generation telecom networks. However, existing machine learning (ML) approaches face significant limitations in scalability and explainability, restricting their effectiveness in real-world deployments. We propose TelcoAgent, a foundation model-based framework that enables accurate, scalable, and explainable forecasting of multiple KPMs across diverse network cells without the need for site-specific training. Specifically, the framework comprises three key components: (i) an automated three-agent pipeline that constructs a 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) knowledge graph directly from specification documents, (ii) a scalable, time-series foundation model (TSFM)-based prediction pipeline to deliver accurate, zero-shot forecasting, and finally (iii) a reasoning and explanation pipeline that provides actionable, domain-grounded diagnostics. Evaluated using a 3-month, real-world, city-scale 5G KPM dataset from a U.S.-based network operator, TelcoAgent demonstrates high forecasting accuracy for all 7 considered KPMs per cell across 200 cells, while delivering explainable insights and actionable instructions to address network degradations.

Geon Kim, Dara Ron, Sukhdeep Singh +5

†Kyung Hee University, South Korea · *NextG Wireless Lab, North Carolina State University, USA · ‡Samsung R&D Institute India, Bangalore, India

Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasting Explainable Artificial Intelligence Time Series Forecasting Wireless Communications