Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Resource Management in SWIPT Enabled Cellular Networks with H2H/M2M Co-Existence

TL;DR

This paper proposes a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning framework for resource management in SWIPT-enabled cellular networks supporting H2H and M2M coexistence, optimizing energy efficiency and QoS.

Contribution

It introduces a novel DRL-based resource management scheme for energy harvesting M2M devices in cellular networks with diverse QoS needs, improving efficiency and convergence.

Findings

The DRL scheme outperforms other approaches in convergence speed.

It effectively manages spectrum, power, and energy harvesting ratios.

Network performance meets EE and QoS constraints.

Abstract

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is crucial in developing Internet of Things (IoT). As it is well known that cellular networks have been considered as the primary infrastructure for M2M communications, there are several key issues to be addressed in order to deploy M2M communications over cellular networks. Notably, the rapid growth of M2M traffic dramatically increases energy consumption, as well as degrades the performance of existing Human-to-Human (H2H) traffic. Sustainable operation technology and resource management are efficacious ways for solving these issues. In this paper, we investigate a resource management problem in cellular networks with H2H/M2M coexistence. First, considering the energy-constrained nature of machine type communication devices (MTCDs), we propose a novel network model enabled by simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), which empowers MTCDs with the ability to simultaneously perform energy harvesting (EH) and information decoding. Given the diverse characteristics of IoT devices, we subdivide MTCDs into critical and tolerable types, further formulating the resource management problem as an energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem under divers Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints. Then, we develop a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based scheme to solve this problem. It provides optimal spectrum, transmit power and power splitting (PS) ratio allocation policies, along with efficient model training under designed behaviour-tracking based state space and common reward function. Finally, we verify that with a reasonable training mechanism, multiple M2M agents successfully work cooperatively in a distributed way, resulting in network performance that outperforms other intelligence approaches in terms of convergence speed and meeting the EE and QoS requirements.