Ali Maatouk

Ali Maatouk
Huawei Technologies · Department of R&D

Doctor of Engineering
Research engineer working on data-driven modeling and optimization of 5G networks

About

55
Publications
3,880
Reads
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1,391
Citations

Publications

Publications (55)
Preprint
Full-text available
Wireless ray-tracing (RT) is emerging as a key tool for three-dimensional (3D) wireless channel modeling, driven by advances in graphical rendering. Current approaches struggle to accurately model beyond 5G (B5G) network signaling, which often operates at higher frequencies and is more susceptible to environmental conditions and changes. Existing o...
Preprint
The drive toward automating cellular network operations has grown with the increasing complexity of these systems. Despite advancements, full autonomy currently remains out of reach due to reliance on human intervention for modeling network behaviors and defining policies to meet target requirements. Network Digital Twins (NDTs) have shown promise...
Preprint
Full-text available
Despite the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs), they still exhibit a limited capability to align their outputs to the user instructions. In this work, we introduce a simple and effective method, which we name GUIDE, that mechanistically increases attention scores in instruction tokens. To support this operation, we present Influence...
Preprint
Full-text available
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly impacted various fields, from natural language processing to sectors like medicine and finance. However, despite their rapid proliferation, the applications of LLMs in telecommunications remain limited, often relying on general-purpose models that lack domain-specific specialization. T...
Preprint
Full-text available
With the advent of large language models (LLMs), managing scientific literature via LLMs has become a promising direction of research. However, existing approaches often overlook the rich structural and semantic relevance among scientific literature, limiting their ability to discern the relationships between pieces of scientific knowledge, and suf...
Article
In this paper, we study network reliability in relation to a periodic time-dependent utility function that reflects the system’s functional performance. When an anomaly occurs, the system incurs a loss of utility that depends on the anomaly’s timing and duration. We analyze the long-term average utility loss by considering exponential anomalies’ in...
Article
Large language models (LLMs) -- AI-driven models that can achieve general-purpose language understanding and generation -- have emerged as a transformative force, revolutionizing fields well beyond natural language processing (NLP) and garnering unprecedented attention. As LLM technology continues to progress, the telecom industry is facing the pro...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
As deep learning models become increasingly large, they pose significant challenges in heterogeneous devices environments. The size of deep learning models makes it difficult to deploy them on low-power or resource-constrained devices, leading to long inference times and high energy consumption. To address these challenges, we propose FlexTrain, a...
Preprint
Full-text available
Large Language Models (LLMs), AI-driven models that can achieve general-purpose language understanding and generation, have emerged as a transformative force, revolutionizing fields well beyond Natural Language Processing (NLP) and garnering unprecedented attention. As LLM technology continues to progress, the telecom industry is facing the prospec...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this paper, we introduce a new metric, named Penalty upon Decision (PuD), for measuring the impact of communication delays and state changes at the source on a remote decision maker. Specifically, the metric quantifies the performance degradation at the decision maker's side due to delayed, erroneous, and (possibly) missed decisions. We clarify...
Preprint
This paper considers an anomaly detection problem in which a detection algorithm assigns anomaly scores to multi-dimensional data points, such as cellular networks' Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). We propose an optimization framework to refine these anomaly scores by leveraging side information in the form of a causality graph between the variou...
Preprint
In this paper, we study network reliability in relation to a periodic time-dependent utility function that reflects the system's functional performance. When an anomaly occurs, the system incurs a loss of utility that depends on the anomaly's timing and duration. We analyze the long-term average utility loss by considering exponential anomalies' in...
Article
In this paper, we analyze status update systems modeled through the Stochastic Hybrid Systems (SHSs) tool. Contrary to previous works, we allow the system’s transition dynamics to be polynomial functions of the Age of Information (AoI). This dependence allows us to encapsulate many applications and opens the door for more sophisticated systems to b...
Article
In this paper, we introduce the Age of Incorrect Information (AoII) as an enabler for semantics-empowered communication, a newly advocated communication paradigm centered around data’s role and its usefulness to the communication’s goal. First, we shed light on how the traditional communication paradigm, with its role-blind approach to data, is vul...
Article
In this paper, we consider a scheduling problem, in which several streams of status update packets with different priority levels are sent through a shared channel to their destinations. We introduce a notion of lexicographic age optimality , or simply lex-age-optimality , to evaluate the performance of multi-class status update policies. In pa...
Article
Full-text available
This paper examines the average age minimization problem where only a fraction of the network users can transmit simultaneously over unreliable channels. Finding the optimal scheduling scheme, in this case, is known to be challenging. Accordingly, the Whittle’s index policy was proposed in the literature as a low-complexity heuristic to the problem...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this paper, we analyze status update systems modeled through the Stochastic Hybrid Systems (SHSs) tool. Contrary to previous works, we allow the system's transition dynamics to be functions of the Age of Information (AoI). This dependence allows us to encapsulate many applications and opens the door for more sophisticated systems to be studied....
Preprint
Full-text available
This paper examines the average age minimization problem where only a fraction of the network users can transmit simultaneously over unreliable channels. Finding the optimal scheduling scheme, in this case, is known to be challenging. Accordingly, the Whittle's index policy was proposed in the literature as a low-complexity heuristic to the problem...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this paper, we introduce the Age of Incorrect Information (AoII) as an enabler for semantics-empowered communication, a newly advocated communication paradigm centered around data's role and its usefulness to the communication's goal. First, we shed light on how the traditional communication paradigm, with its role-blind approach to data, is vul...
Thesis
Full-text available
The proliferation of smartphones, along with the ubiquitous connectivity and cheap hardware cost, has paved the way for new applications that rely on the timely delivery of packets from one end of the network to another. From monitoring home appliances back at the house to vehicular networks where the vehicle’s velocity and position information are...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, we consider the average age minimization problem where a central entity schedules M users among the N available users for transmission over unreliable channels. It is well-known that obtaining the optimal policy, in this case, is a difficult task. Accordingly, the Whittle’s index policy has been suggested in earlier works as a heuris...
Article
In this paper, we introduce a new performance metric in the framework of status updates that we will refer to as the Age of Incorrect Information (AoII). This new metric deals with the shortcomings of both the Age of Information (AoI) and the conventional error penalty functions as it neatly extends the notion of fresh updates to that of fresh "inf...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, we investigate a network where N links contend for the channel using the well-known carrier sense multiple access scheme. By leveraging the notion of stochastic hybrid systems, we find: 1) a closed-form expression of the average age when links generate packets at will 2) an upperbound of the average age when packets arrive stochastic...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this paper, we consider a transmission scheduling problem, in which several streams of status update packets with diverse priority levels are sent through a shared channel to their destinations. We introduce a notion of Lexicographic age optimality, or simply lex-age-optimality, to evaluate the performance of multi-class status update policies....
Preprint
Full-text available
In this paper, we consider the average age minimization problem where a central entity schedules M users among the N available users for transmission over unreliable channels. It is well-known that obtaining the optimal policy, in this case, is out of reach. Accordingly, the Whittle's index policy has been suggested in earlier works as a heuristic...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this paper, we introduce a new performance metric in the framework of status updates that we will refer to as the Age of Incorrect Information (AoII). This new metric deals with the shortcomings of both the Age of Information (AoI) and the conventional error penalty functions as it neatly extends the notion of fresh updates to that of fresh "inf...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this paper, we consider N information streams sharing a common service facility. The streams are supposed to have different priorities based on their sensitivity. A higher priority stream will always preempt the service of a lower priority packet. By leveraging the notion of Stochastic Hybrid Systems (SHS), we investigate the Age of Information...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this paper, we examine the potentials of Non- Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA), currently rivaling Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA) in 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardization for future 5G networks Machine Type Communications (MTC), in the framework of minimizing the average Age of Information (AoI). By leveraging the notion o...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this paper, we investigate a network of N interfering links contending for the channel to send their data by employing the well-known Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) scheme. By leveraging the notion of stochastic hybrid systems, we find a closed form of the total average age of the network in this setting. Armed with this expression, we for...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this paper, we examine a system where status updates are generated by a source and are forwarded in a First-Come-First-Served (FCFS) manner to the monitor. We consider the case where the server has other tasks to fulfill, a simple example being relaying the packets of another stream. Due to the server's necessity to go on vacations, the age proc...
Article
We present a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme based on combining orthogonal frequencydivision multiple access (OFDMA) and multi-carrier codedivision multiple access (MC-CDMA). Contrary to other NOMA architectures, the proposed approach does not require any power imbalance between user signals, making it possible to grant all users the s...
Article
Massive MIMO is widely considered as a key enabler of the next generation 5G networks. With a large number of antennas at the Base Station, both spectral and energy efficiencies can be enhanced. Unfortunately, the downlink channel estimation overhead scales linearly with the number of antennas. This burden is easily mitigated in TDD systems by the...
Preprint
Massive MIMO is widely considered as a key enabler of the next generation 5G networks. With a large number of antennas at the Base Station, both spectral and energy efficiencies can be enhanced. Unfortunately, the downlink channel estimation overhead scales linearly with the number of antennas. This burden is easily mitigated in TDD systems by the...
Article
Full-text available
Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) is widely used as a Medium Access Control (MAC) in wireless networks thanks to its simplicity and distributive nature. This motivated researchers to find CSMA schemes that achieves throughput optimality. In 2008, it has been shown that even simple CSMAtype algorithms is able to achieve optimality in terms of thr...
Article
Full-text available
Massive MIMO is considered as one of the key enablers of the next generation 5G networks.With a high number of antennas at the BS, both spectral and energy efficiencies can be improved. Unfortunately, the downlink channel estimation overhead scales linearly with the number of antenna. This does not create complications in Time Division Duplex (TDD)...
Preprint
Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) is widely used as a Medium Access Control (MAC) in wireless networks due to its simplicity and distributed nature. This motivated researchers to find CSMA schemes that achieve throughput optimality. In 2008, it has been shown that a simple CSMA-type algorithm is able to achieve optimality in terms of throughput...
Article
Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) is recognized today as a most promising technology for future 5G cellular networks and a large number of papers have been published on the subject over the past few years. Interestingly, none of these authors seems to be aware that the foundation of NOMA actually dates back to the year 2000, when a series of pa...

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