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- Lei, Wanlu
(författare)
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A study of wireless communications with reinforcement learning
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The explosive proliferation of mobile users and wireless data traffic in recent years pose imminent challenges upon wireless system design. The trendfor wireless communications becoming more complicated, decentralized andintelligent is inevitable. Lots of key issues in this field are decision-makingrelated problems such as resource allocation, transmission control, intelligentbeam tracking in millimeter Wave (mmWave) systems and so on. Reinforcement learning (RL) was once a languishing field of AI for solving varioussequential decision-making problems. However, it got revived in the late 80sand early 90s when it was connected to dynamic programming (DP). Then,recently RL has progressed in many applications, especially when underliningmodels do not have explicit mathematical solutions and simulations must beused. For instance, the success of RL in AlphaGo and AlphaZero motivatedlots of recent research activities in RL from both academia and industries.Moreover, since computation power has dramatically increased within thelast decade, the methods of simulations and online learning (planning) become feasible for implementations and deployment of RL. Despite of its potentials, the applications of RL to wireless communications are still far frommature. Therefore, it is of great interest to investigate RL-based methodsand algorithms to adapt to different wireless communication scenarios. Morespecifically, this thesis with regards to RL in wireless communications can beroughly divided into the following parts:In the first part of the thesis, we develop a framework based on deepRL (DRL) to solve the spectrum allocation problem in the emerging integrated access and backhaul (IAB) architecture with large scale deploymentand dynamic environment. We propose to use the latest DRL method by integrating an actor-critic spectrum allocation (ACSA) scheme and a deep neuralnetwork (DNN) to achieve real-time spectrum allocation in different scenarios. The proposed methods are evaluated through numerical simulations andshow promising results compared with some baseline allocation policies.In the second part of the thesis, we investigate the decentralized RL algorithms using Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) in applications of Edge IoT. For RL in a decentralized setup, edge nodes (agents)connected through a communication network aim to work collaboratively tofind a policy to optimize the global reward as the sum of local rewards. However, communication costs, scalability and adaptation in complex environments with heterogeneous agents may significantly limit the performance ofdecentralized RL. ADMM has a structure that allows for decentralized implementation and has shown faster convergence than gradient-descent-basedmethods. Therefore, we propose an adaptive stochastic incremental ADMM(asI-ADMM) algorithm and apply the asI-ADMM to decentralized RL withedge computing-empowered IoT networks. We provide convergence properties for proposed algorithms by designing a Lyapunov function and prove thatthe asI-ADMM has O(1=k) + O(1=M) convergence rate where k and M are thenumber of iterations and batch samples, respectively.The third part of the thesis considers the problem of joint beam training and data transmission control of delay-sensitive communications overvimmWave channels. We formulate the problem as a constrained Markov Decision Process (MDP), which aims to minimize the cumulative energy consumption over the whole considered period of time under delay constraints.By introducing a Lagrange multiplier, we reformulate the constrained MDPto an unconstrained one. Then, we solve it using the parallel-rollout-basedRL method in a data-driven manner. Our numerical results demonstrate thatthe optimized policy obtained from parallel rollout significantly outperformsother baseline policies in both energy consumption and delay performance.The final part of the thesis is a further study of the beam tracking problem using supervised learning approach. Due to computation and delay limitation in real deployment, a light-weight algorithm is desired in the beamtracking problem in mmWave networks. We formulate the beam tracking(beam sweeping) problem as a binary-classification problem, and investigatesupervised learning methods for the solution. The methods are tested in bothsimulation scenarios, i.e., ray-tracing model, and real testing data with Ericsson over-the-air (OTA) dataset. It showed that the proposed methods cansignificantly improve cell capacity and reduce overhead consumption whenthe number of UEs increases in the network.
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- Lei, Wanlu, et al.
(författare)
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Adaptive Beam Sweeping With Supervised Learning
- 2022
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Ingår i: IEEE Wireless Communications Letters. - : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). - 2162-2337 .- 2162-2345. ; 11:12, s. 2650-2654
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Utilizing millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies for wireless communication in mobile systems is challenging since continuous tracking of the beam direction is needed. For the purpose, beam sweeping is performed periodically. Such approach can be sufficient in the initial deployment of the network when the number of users is small. However, a more efficient solution is needed when lots of users are connected to the network due to higher overhead consumption. We explore a supervised learning approach to adaptively perform beam sweeping, which has low implementation complexity and can improve cell capacity by reducing beam sweeping overhead. By formulating the beam tracking problem as a binary classification problem, we applied supervised learning methods to solve the formulated problem. The methods were tested on two scenarios: ray-tracing outdoor scenario and over-the-air (OTA) testing dataset from Ericsson. Both experimental results show that the proposed methods significantly increase cell throughput comparing with existing exhaustive sweeping and periodical sweeping strategies.
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| 4. |
- Lei, Wanlu, et al.
(författare)
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Adaptive Beam Tracking With Supervised Learning
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Utilizing millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies forwireless communication in mobile systems is challenging sincecontinuous tracking of the beam direction is needed. For the purpose, beam sweeping is performed periodically. Such approachcan be sufficient in the initial deployment of the network whenthe number of users is small. However, a more efficient solutionis needed when lots of users are connected to the network due tohigher overhead consumption. We explore a supervised learningapproach to adaptively perform beam sweeping, which has lowimplementation complexity and can improve cell capacity byreducing beam sweeping overhead. By formulating the beamtracking problem as a binary classification problem, we appliedsupervised learning methods to solve the formulated problem.The methods were tested on two scenarios: ray-tracing outdoorscenario and over-the-air (OTA) testing dataset from Ericsson.Both experimental results show that the proposed methodssignificantly increase cell throughput comparing with existingexhaustive sweeping and periodical sweeping strategies.
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| 6. |
- Lei, Wanlu, et al.
(författare)
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Adaptive Stochastic ADMM for Decentralized Reinforcement Learning in Edge IoT
- 2022
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Ingår i: IEEE Internet of Things Journal. - : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). - 2327-4662. ; 9:22, s. 22958-22971
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Edge computing provides a promising paradigm to support the implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) by offloading tasks to nearby edge nodes. Meanwhile, the increasing network size makes it impractical for centralized data processing due to limited bandwidth, and consequently a decentralized learning scheme is preferable. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely investigated and shown to be a promising solution for decision-making and optimal control processes. For RL in a decentralized setup, edge nodes (agents) connected through a communication network aim to work collaboratively to find a policy to optimize the global reward as the sum of local rewards. However, communication costs, scalability, and adaptation in complex environments with heterogeneous agents may significantly limit the performance of decentralized RL. Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) has a structure that allows for decentralized implementation and has shown faster convergence than gradient descent-based methods. Therefore, we propose an adaptive stochastic incremental ADMM (asI-ADMM) algorithm and apply the asI-ADMM to decentralized RL with edge-computing-empowered IoT networks. We provide convergence properties for the proposed algorithms by designing a Lyapunov function and prove that the asI-ADMM has O(1/k) + O(1/M) convergence rate, where k and M are the number of iterations and batch samples, respectively. Then, we test our algorithm with two supervised learning problems. For performance evaluation, we simulate two applications in decentralized RL settings with homogeneous and heterogeneous agents. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithms outperform the state of the art in terms of communication costs and scalability and can well adapt to complex IoT environments.
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| 7. |
- Lei, Wanlu, et al.
(författare)
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Deep reinforcement learning-based spectrum allocation in integrated access and backhaul networks
- 2020
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Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking. - : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). - 2332-7731. ; 6:3, s. 970-979
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We develop a framework based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to solve the spectrum allocation problem in the emerging integrated access and backhaul (IAB) architecture with large scale deployment and dynamic environment. The available spectrum is divided into several orthogonal sub-channels, and the donor base station (DBS) and all IAB nodes have the same spectrum resource for allocation, where a DBS utilizes those sub-channels for access links of associated user equipment (UE) as well as for backhaul links of associated IAB nodes, and an IAB node can utilize all for its associated UEs. This is one of key features in which 5G differs from traditional settings where the backhaul networks are designed independently from the access networks. With the goal of maximizing the sum log-rate of all UE groups, we formulate the spectrum allocation problem into a mix-integer and non-linear programming. However, it is intractable to find an optimal solution especially when the IAB network is large and time-varying. To tackle this problem, we propose to use the latest DRL method by integrating an actor-critic spectrum allocation (ACSA) scheme and deep neural network (DNN) to achieve real-time spectrum allocation in different scenarios. The proposed methods are evaluated through numerical simulations and show promising results compared with some baseline allocation policies.
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| 8. |
- Lei, Wanlu, et al.
(författare)
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Joint Beam Training and Data Transmission Control for mmWave Delay-Sensitive Communications : A Parallel Reinforcement Learning Approach
- 2022
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Ingår i: IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing. - : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). - 1932-4553. ; 16:3, s. 447-459
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Future communication networks call for new solutions to support their capacity and delay demands by leveraging potentials of the millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band. However, the beam training procedure in mmWave systems incurs significant overhead as well as huge energy consumption. As such, deriving an adaptive control policy is beneficial to both delay-sensitive and energy-efficient data transmission over mmWave networks. To this end, we investigate the problem of joint beam training and data transmission control for mmWave delay-sensitive communications in this paper. Specifically, the considered problem is firstly formulated as a constrained Markov Decision Process (MDP), which aims to minimize the cumulative energy consumption over the whole considered period of time under delay constraint. By introducing a Lagrange multiplier, we transform the constrained MDP into an unconstrained one, which is then solved via a parallel-rollout-based reinforcement learning method in a data-driven manner. Our numerical results demonstrate that the optimized policy via parallel-rollout significantly outperforms other baseline policies in both energy consumption and delay performance.
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