A method of wireless communication by a user equipment (UE) includes receiving an uplink grant from a network device. The method also includes determining, by a lower analog media access control (MAC-A) layer of an analog data communications stack, a quantity of analog neural network gradients to transmit in a data packet using resources allocated by the uplink grant. The determining is based on an analog physical (PHY-A) layer encoding scheme and the resources allocated by the uplink grant. The method further includes segmenting the analog neural network gradients into the data packet. The method still further includes transferring the data packet to the PHY-A layer for transmission to the network device across a wireless network.