Task-Oriented Communications for NextG: End-to-End Deep Learning and AI Security Aspects

Communications systems to date are primarily designed with the goal of reliable (error-free) transfer of digital sequences (bits). Next generation (NextG) communication systems are beginning to explore shifting this design paradigm of reliably decoding bits to reliably executing a given task. Task-oriented communications system design is likely to find impactful applications, for example, considering the relative importance of messages. In this paper, a wireless signal classification is considered as the task to be performed in the NextG Radio Access Network (RAN) for signal intelligence and spectrum awareness applications such as user equipment (UE) identification and authentication, and incumbent signal detection for spectrum co-existence. For that purpose, edge devices collect wireless signals and communicate with the NextG base station (gNodeB) that needs to know the signal class. Edge devices may not have sufficient processing power and may not be trusted to perform the signal classification task, whereas the transfer of the captured signals from the edge devices to the gNodeB may not be efficient or even feasible subject to stringent delay, rate, and energy restrictions. We present a task-oriented communications approach, where all the transmitter, receiver and classifier functionalities are jointly trained as two deep neural networks (DNNs), one for the edge device and another for the gNodeB. We show that this approach achieves better accuracy with smaller DNNs compared to the baselines that treat communications and signal classification as two separate tasks. Finally, we discuss how adversarial machine learning poses a major security threat for the use of DNNs for task-oriented communications. We demonstrate the major performance loss under backdoor (Trojan) attacks and adversarial (evasion) attacks that target the training and test processes of task-oriented communications.