IEEE Communications Magazine provides timely information on all aspects of (electrical/electronic) communications. The magazine covers services (telecommunications, multimedia, Internet and digital), network (including its softwarization, as well as underlying infrastructure) and device technology, support systems, transversal topics like artificial intelligence applied to telecommunications, market trends, strategy and regulatory issues. Articles are tutorial in nature and written in a style comprehensible to readers outside the specialty of the article. These articles are complemented with non-indexed columns.

Special Issue on AI for Communications and Communications for AI
Submission Date: 2024-09-30

With the accelerated development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, AI has been widely used in many fields of the society, and ubiquitous intelligence has become one of the main visions of the 6th generation mobile communication network (6G) towards 2030. However, the 5th mobile communication network applies AI technologies as a tool to optimize the traditional algorithms and operations in a patch-on manner. Unlike 5G, the goal of 6G is to provide AI as a service for both the network itself and external use cases, enabling on-demand AI capabilities at anytime and anywhere. To achieve this, the 6G network architecture needs to consider the deep integration of information, communication, and data technologies, and build a full lifecycle resource management framework for computing, data, AI models, and communication. The 6G network can ultimately efficiently provide AI as a service for differentiated AI application scenarios. To rapidly promote future networks towards full-autonomy and full-intelligence, academic and industrial researchers need to work on the native AI design for 6G network to fulfill the requirements of AI for communications and communications for AI. Many open issues need to be resolved, including architecture design, protocol design, algorithms, quality guarantee of AI services, management of multi-dimensional resources, and security and privacy assurance. Hence, this Special Issue (SI) aims to bring together researchers and experts from academia and industry to consider the deep integration of communications and AI.

We seek original completed and unpublished work not currently under review by any other journal/magazine/conference. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

 - 6G network architecture design for ubiquitous intelligence
 - Distributed AI models and algorithms for 6G networks
 - Explainable and trustworthy AI for 6G networks
 - AI model transmission and sharing in wireless communications
 - Generative AI models and AI agent for 6G high-level network autonomy
 - Dataset and model training of AI for communication
 - Pre-validation of network AI
 - Metrics to evaluate the quality of AI service
 - Framework and procedures to provide AI as a service
 - Service orchestration of AI
 - Joint resource management of computing, data, AI models and communication
 - Joint optimization of communication and computing for ubiquitous intelligence
 - Coordination for AI among the device, network and cloud
 - Lite network protocols and technologies of network for AI
 - Energy-efficient AI towards green 6G
 - Testbeds and prototypes of 6G network enabled AI services and applications