Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Dynamic Power and Beamforming Design for Time-Varying Wireless Downlink Interference Channel

TL;DR

This paper develops deep reinforcement learning algorithms, DDPG and hierarchical DDPG, to optimize power and beamforming in time-varying wireless downlink channels, aiming to maximize sum rate under practical constraints.

Contribution

It introduces two novel DRL algorithms tailored for dynamic wireless channels, addressing sparse rewards and discrete actions, improving performance over traditional methods.

Findings

Both algorithms achieve high coverage and convergence.

They significantly improve sum rate performance.

Hierarchical DDPG effectively handles sparse rewards.

Abstract

With the high development of wireless communication techniques, it is widely used in various fields for convenient and efficient data transmission. Different from commonly used assumption of the time-invariant wireless channel, we focus on the research on the time-varying wireless downlink channel to get close to the practical situation. Our objective is to gain the maximum value of sum rate in the time-varying channel under the some constraints about cut-off signal-to-interference and noise ratio (SINR), transmitted power and beamforming. In order to adapt the rapid changing channel, we abandon the frequently used algorithm convex optimization and deep reinforcement learning algorithms are used in this paper. From the view of the ordinary measures such as power control, interference incoordination and beamforming, continuous changes of measures should be put into consideration while sparse reward problem due to the abortion of episodes as an important bottleneck should not be ignored. Therefore, with the analysis of relevant algorithms, we proposed two algorithms, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm (DDPG) and hierarchical DDPG, in our work. As for these two algorithms, in order to solve the discrete output, DDPG is established by combining the Actor-Critic algorithm with Deep Q-learning (DQN), so that it can output the continuous actions without sacrificing the existed advantages brought by DQN and also can improve the performance. Also, to address the challenge of sparse reward, we take advantage of meta policy from the idea of hierarchical theory to divide one agent in DDPG into one meta-controller and one controller as hierarchical DDPG. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DDPG and hierarchical DDPG performs well from the views of coverage, convergence and sum rate performance.