Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2505.15854

Integration of TinyML and LargeML: A Survey of 6G and Beyond

Abstract

The evolution from fifth-generation (5G) to sixth-generation (6G) networks is driving an unprecedented demand for advanced machine learning (ML) solutions. Deep learning has already demonstrated significant impact across mobile networking and communication systems, enabling intelligent services such as smart healthcare, smart grids, autonomous vehicles, aerial platforms, digital twins, and the metaverse. At the same time, the rapid proliferation of resource-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices has accelerated the adoption of tiny machine learning (TinyML) for efficient on-device intelligence, while large machine learning (LargeML) models continue to require substantial computational resources to support large-scale IoT services and ML-generated content. These trends highlight the need for a unified framework that integrates TinyML and LargeML to achieve seamless connectivity, scalable intelligence, and efficient resource management in future 6G systems. This survey provides a comprehensive review of recent advances enabling the integration of TinyML and LargeML in next-generation wireless networks. In particular, we (i) provide an overview of TinyML and LargeML, (ii) analyze the motivations and requirements for unifying these paradigms within the 6G context, (iii) examine efficient bidirectional integration approaches, (iv) review state-of-the-art solutions and their applicability to emerging 6G services, and (v) identify key challenges related to performance optimization, deployment feasibility, resource orchestration, and security. Finally, we outline promising research directions to guide the holistic integration of TinyML and LargeML for intelligent, scalable, and energy-efficient 6G networks and beyond.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Thai-Hoc Vu, Ngo Hoang Tu, Thien Huynh-The, Kyungchun Lee, Sunghwan Kim, Miroslav Voznak, Quoc-Viet Pham. 2026-03-13. Integration of TinyML and LargeML: A Survey of 6G and Beyond. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15854

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Semord: Learned Semantic-Preserving Placement and Low-Fanout Routing for Distributed Vector Search

Vector databases are increasingly deployed in distributed settings where different users, sites, or domains maintain vector data. Existing vector databases rely on a coordinator to record which shards store which parts of the vector space and to route each query to those shards. In a decentralized setting, peers may join, leave, or move data without a trusted node tracking every change, and outdated routing information can therefore send queries to the wrong peers or require contacting many peers, reducing vector retrieval recall and increasing network latency. We present Semord, a decentralized vector search overlay system that achieves high recall by routing each ANN query to a small set of relevant peers, without relying on a centralized coordinator. Semord addresses this problem by making semantic locality routable: 1) We propose VHash to place semantically related vectors near each other in the overlay key space while avoiding load imbalance, so that each query only needs to contact a small neighborhood of peers for distributed local ANN ranking. 2) We design VecDHT, a communication protocol that maintains decentralized routing, region metadata, churn resilience, and VHash updates under membership and workload changes. Our extensive experiments on a real testbed show that Semord improves recall by more than 15% and reduces contacted peers by over 60% compared with decentralized baselines. Semord also approaches the recall and latency of a centralized oracle baseline while reducing peak peer-local ANN index memory by more than 2X. Controlled large-scale simulations further show that Semord scales across real-world embedding workloads and remains robust under churn for scoped vector retrieval as a decentralized overlay.

cs.NI

Lizard: Bandwidth-Adaptive Real-Time Video Analytics through Content-Aware Packet Discarding at Last-Mile Edge Routers

The timeliness and accuracy of edge-based video analytics can be hindered by drastic reductions in available bandwidth (ABW) at last-mile edge routers, causing prolonged queuing delays. This work proposes Lizard, a system that leverages video-content-aware packet discarding to mitigate the negative effects of drastic ABW degradation that may frequently occur at a last-mile edge router by judiciously discarding packets that contain frame blocks less important to the analytics at the destination. To achieve this, we first devise a frame-block-aware RTP header extension to effectively decouple packet dependencies to encode frame blocks. Second, Lizard uses a priority-based feedback mechanism that dynamically evaluates packet priorities based on relative accuracy impacts. Third, we develop an adaptive phase-transition-based packet discarding strategy at the router to discard packets that represent unimportant blocks. Our evaluation of Lizard shows improvements over existing methods are substantial: 53.2% reduction in latency and 27.1% increase in analysis accuracy.

cs.NI

Flux: Optimal Scheduling of Optical Circuit Switches for LLM Training

Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) offers high bandwidth density and energy efficiency for LLM training, but incurs a non-negligible reconfiguration delay. Prior work typically schedules optical circuit switches independently of compute, using aggregate traffic demand to determine which circuits to provision and when. We argue that this separation creates a fundamental inefficiency: reconfigurations that ignore the compute timeline can stall communication, resulting in low circuit utilization and large buffer requirements. In this paper, we present Flux, a scheduler that optimally schedules optical circuit switches based on the structure of the entire workload. Flux remains effective across a wide range of switching speeds by reusing circuits and amortizing reconfiguration delay behind compute and communication. We show that Flux reduces training iteration time by up to $10\times$ and peak NIC buffer requirements by more than three orders of magnitude compared to traditional periodic schedulers.

cs.NI