wireless network operators

Abstract: Radio Frequency(RF)-Fingerprinting is a spectrum monitoring technique that identifies specific transmitters based on hardware impairments imprinted within the emitted signal. Although widely researched, studies almost exclusively consider scenarios where only one transmitter is emitting at a time, limiting real world applicability. In this work, we further the study of RF-Fingerprinting by considering co-channel interference, with multiple emitted signals interfering with each other, overlapping in time and frequency. Specifically, we formulate this problem as a multi-label classification problem and employ a 1D convolutional neural network (CNN). Furthermore, the models are calibrated such that the confidence thresholds for the label probabilities are derived, with guarantees on the upper bound on the average number of False Negatives, providing a degree of confidence in not missing a true spectrum policy violation. The proposed method is validated using real world data from the POWDER 5G testbed on devices transmitting 802.11a(Wi-Fi), 4G LTE, and 5G NR waveforms. The results show accuracy as high as 97% and as low as 73% after calibration depending on channel conditions. Also calibrating for various average false negatives upper bounds achieves micro recall scores of approximately (1 - calibrated false negatives) with the calibration robust to out-of-distribution interference, demonstrating the potential of the proposed method in a realistic high contention wireless environment

Abstract: The O-RAN control plane is becoming agentic: autonomous AI agents, deployed as rApps by different vendors, independently close control loops over shared radio resources. We demonstrate on a live O-RAN system that this independence is unsafe. Two agents with individually correct objectives, one protecting a latency SLA and one maximizing utilization for energy efficiency, jointly drive recurring opposing excursions of the shared resource partition that neither produces alone. Existing conflict-mitigation mechanisms presume a statically known application population and cannot govern agents whose behavior emerges at run time. We present AURA, a lightweight arbitration layer that admits agent actions only when they satisfy feasibility invariants, per-variable dwell times, and a deadband, and we prove the arbitrated system converges to a feasible operating point. Implemented on an OpenAirInterface (OAI) testbed with measured one-way latency and throughput, AURA reduces recurring shared-state excursions by more than an order of magnitude (from 8.4 to 0.4 PRB amplitude) and virtually eliminates cross-slice throughput starvation (from 40-55% to 0.3%), while leaving the protected slice's own latency compliance unchanged, a trade-off the convergence guarantee makes explicit.

Abstract: This paper investigates market competition among wireless service providers (SPs) that serve customers using shared spectrum. Prior work has analyzed such markets through models of competition with congestible resources, capturing both the congestion-sensitive nature of wireless spectrum and the effects of spectrum sharing on service quality. These models typically assume that the market demand function is known, enabling SPs to optimize pricing or quantity decisions under either Bertrand or Cournot competition. In contrast, we consider a setting in which the demand function is initially unknown and must be learned over time. We model this learning process using multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), allowing competing SPs to learn market dynamics while adapting their competitive strategies. Although MARL has shown strong performance in a variety of economic settings, recent work has demonstrated that it can also give rise to tacit collusion among self-interested agents. We therefore examine whether similar collusive behavior emerges in shared-spectrum markets and how its prevalence depends on the mode of competition (price versus quantity) and the choice of MARL algorithm. Our results provide insight into the interaction between learning dynamics, market structure, and spectrum sharing, with implications for both wireless market design and the deployment of learning-enabled decision-making systems.

Abstract: Radio Dynamic Zones (RDZs) allow wireless experiments to operate outside conventional spectrum regulations while continuously guaranteeing protection for incumbent users. Existing RDZ prototypes automate this task procedurally, through handcrafted rules and predefined workflows, and become brittle when experiments encounter hardware impairments, user workflows and devices, or interference mechanisms not anticipated at design time. This paper introduces the agentic RDZ (A-RDZ), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first RDZ realization in which agents use Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform spectrum management, experiment management, policy interpretation, and zone orchestration. Built on the GENESIS agentic framework, the architecture pairs autonomous reasoning with a deterministic policy gate and near-real-time (near-RT) reflexes, so that agents can improve outcomes but never weaken the zone's protection guarantee. We validate the A-RDZ on a hardware-in-the-loop Frequency Range 3 (FR3) (7.125-24.25 GHz) Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) testbed in which a 5G New Radio (NR) experiment coexists with an emulated Fixed Satellite Service (FSS) earth-station incumbent. In an end-to-end use case, the monitoring agent detects an emission violation from live spectrum evidence, the orchestrator selects a mitigation that restores the interference budget while keeping the experiment running, and the action is applied and verified through the O-RAN control plane. We report the detection-to-mitigation latency decomposition and discuss the practical limits of agentic operation, including non-deterministic reasoning and decision-to-action translation.

Abstract: Wireless edge caching networks typically consist of many independent Base Stations (BSs), each facing its own request rate and content popularity profile. Training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) caching agent from scratch at every BS forces each agent to relearn, through slow trial and error, a decision problem that is structurally identical across the network. Meta-reinforcement learning removes this redundancy by learning a shared initialization that adapts to any BS in a few local updates; however, meta-training itself becomes the bottleneck at scale: the meta-gradient must be estimated from a small subset of BSs at each meta-iteration, and sampling this subset uniformly at random yields a high-variance estimate, an issue existing meta-RL caching frameworks leave unaddressed. This paper proposes a meta-reinforcement learning framework for caching across independent, non-overlapping BSs that directly targets this bottleneck. Each BS runs a local Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agent, formulated as a Semi-Markov Decision Process (SMDP) over content popularity, size, lifetime, and importance, while a shared meta-policy is learned via a Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML)-style loop. To scale meta-training and accelerate convergence, we introduce gradient-based clustering, which groups BSs by local gradient similarity and draws from every cluster, in proportion to its size, at each meta-iteration. We prove, via an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)-style decomposition of gradient variance, that this strategy yields a strictly lower-variance meta-gradient estimator than uniform random sampling under BS heterogeneity.

Abstract: 3GPP has progressively expanded AI/ML lifecycle management in the radio access network, from one-sided model control to Release 20 support for two-sided CSI-feedback model pairing. Yet a basic control question remains: when monitoring detects degradation, how quickly must a corrective action take effect? To expose this dependency, we stress-test three activation and rollback strategies in a surrogate regime-shift environment using 150 independently trained PPO candidate policies, each evaluated over 20 matched noise realizations. We add 0-40 control-step delay only to corrective lifecycle commands. With no added delay, stability-gated blending reduces mean post-shift cumulative SLA deficit from 47.02 to 7.57 violation-steps relative to hard cutover; at 40 steps, the deficit rises to 44.38, only 5.6% below the hard-cutover baseline. KPI-threshold rollback loses its advantage within only a few control intervals, while blending degrades more gradually. These results do not set a physical 6G latency bound. They show why timing requirements matter for corrective actions: lifecycle performance depends on when the command takes effect. Motivated by Layer-1/Layer-2 Triggered Mobility, we examine a standards split in which Layer 3 retains lifecycle configuration while a compact Layer 2 trigger is considered only for the latency-critical subset, together with pair-consistency, local-fallback, and security/freshness requirements.

Abstract: We study random access (RACH) schemes for cell-free (CF) user-centric networks to handle many geographically distributed users with sporadic traffic and intermittent activity. The RACH must allow the system to: 1) detect preambles sent by the (yet unknown) random access users in the RACH slot; 2) localize them for fast allocation of user-centric radio-unit (RU) clusters. Most prior work uses simplified models, neglecting frame-synchronous but chip-asynchronous transmission, possible line-of-sight (LoS) propagation for certain user-RU pairs, and multipath non-line-of-sight (NLoS) propagation yielding frequency-selective channels. Building on our previous work, we consider location-dependent partitioned random access codebooks where users in a geographic area (location) use the corresponding subset of random access preambles. We present a unified framework for joint detection and localization over a spatially consistent network-wide channel model, incorporating these neglected aspects. We evaluate two schemes: 1) a ``legacy'' scheme using Zadoff-Chu (ZC) sequences, extending the 3GPP 2-step RACH to the CF case; 2) our multisource approximate message passing (AMP) approach extended to multipath frequency-selective fading. For both schemes, we develop novel approximated GLRT preamble detection and Maximum-Likelihood position estimators with super-resolution refinement, implicitly exploiting received signal strength, angle of arrival, and time-difference of arrival information embedded into LoS components. Numerical results show that the AMP-based scheme achieves superior preamble detection, while both schemes have similar and excellent localization capability.

Abstract: Using pinching antennas to enhance a user's connection to its own base station (BS) is intuitive and has been well investigated in the literature. This letter focuses on a less intuitive advantage of pinching antennas from the interference-suppression perspective. In particular, using pinching antennas ensures that all BSs serve their users with low transmit power, i.e., BSs can ``whisper", rather than ``shout", to their users. As a result, by experiencing less interference, a user's data rate can still be improved with pinching antennas, even if its link quality to its own BS remains unchanged. A stochastic geometric study is carried out in the letter, where BSs employ fractional power control. Analytical and numerical results are presented to reveal the significant impact of this interference-suppression capability offered by pinching antennas.