Scheduling and Power Control for Wireless Multicast Systems via Deep Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning approach for scalable power control and scheduling in wireless multicast systems, capable of adapting to changing conditions and optimizing multiple objectives.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-timescale deep RL framework for joint power control and queue management in large, dynamic wireless multicast networks.

Findings

Deep RL matches optimal policies in small networks.

The approach scales to larger systems with effective tracking.

It enables cross-layer optimization under constraints.

Abstract

Multicasting in wireless systems is a natural way to exploit the redundancy in user requests in a Content Centric Network. Power control and optimal scheduling can significantly improve the wireless multicast network's performance under fading. However, the model based approaches for power control and scheduling studied earlier are not scalable to large state space or changing system dynamics. In this paper, we use deep reinforcement learning where we use function approximation of the Q-function via a deep neural network to obtain a power control policy that matches the optimal policy for a small network. We show that power control policy can be learnt for reasonably large systems via this approach. Further we use multi-timescale stochastic optimization to maintain the average power constraint. We demonstrate that a slight modification of the learning algorithm allows tracking of time varying system statistics. Finally, we extend the multi-timescale approach to simultaneously learn the optimal queueing strategy along with power control. We demonstrate scalability, tracking and cross layer optimization capabilities of our algorithms via simulations. The proposed multi-timescale approach can be used in general large state space dynamical systems with multiple objectives and constraints, and may be of independent interest.