Communication-Efficient Orchestrations for URLLC Service via Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
2023 (English)In: 2023 IEEE 34th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications: 6G The Next Horizon - From Connected People and Things to Connected Intelligence, PIMRC 2023, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2023Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC) service is envisioned to enable use cases with strict reliability and latency requirements in 5G. One approach for enabling URLLC services is to leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to efficiently allocate wireless resources. However, with conventional RL methods, the decision variables (though being deployed at various network layers) are typically optimized in the same control loop, leading to significant practical limitations on the control loop's delay as well as excessive signaling and energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent Hierarchical RL (HRL) framework that enables the implementation of multi-level policies with different control loop timescales. Agents with faster control loops are deployed closer to the base station, while the ones with slower control loops are at the edge or closer to the core network providing high-level guidelines for low-level actions. On a use case from the prior art, with our HRL framework, we optimized the maximum number of retransmissions and transmission power of industrial devices. Our extensive simulation results on the factory automation scenario show that the HRL framework achieves better performance as the baseline single-agent RL method, with significantly less overhead of signal transmissions and delay compared to the one-agent RL methods.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2023.
Keywords [en]
6G, availability, factory automation, hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL), reliability, URLLC
National Category
Communication Systems Telecommunications
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-341467DOI: 10.1109/PIMRC56721.2023.10293856ISI: 001103214700109Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85178252780OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-341467DiVA, id: diva2:1825819
Conference
34th IEEE Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications, PIMRC 2023, Toronto, Canada, Sep 5 2023 - Sep 8 2023
Note
QC 20231213
Part of ISBN 978-1-6654-6483-3
2024-01-102024-01-102024-02-26Bibliographically approved