Meta Reinforcement Learning for Resource Allocation in Multi-Antenna UAV Network with Rate Splitting Multiple Access

TL;DR

This paper introduces a meta-reinforcement learning approach for resource allocation in a LAS-aided multi-antenna UAV network using RSMA, achieving significant energy efficiency and spectral efficiency improvements in THz downlink communications.

Contribution

It proposes a novel LAS-aided multi-antenna UAV framework with a DDPG-based resource allocation and meta-learning for adaptability, enhancing energy and spectral efficiency.

Findings

Over 20% energy efficiency gain with 4 lenses compared to single-lens UAV.

22% spectral efficiency improvement with RSMA at 10 dB SNR.

27% overall spectral efficiency increase with meta-learning fine-tuning.

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with multiple antennas have recently been explored to improve capacity in wireless networks. However, the strict energy constraint of UAVs, given their simultaneous flying and communication tasks, renders the exploration of energy-efficient multi-antenna techniques indispensable for UAVs. Meanwhile, lens antenna subarray (LAS) emerges as a promising energy-efficient solution that has not been previously harnessed for this purpose. In this paper, we propose a LAS-aided multi-antenna UAV to serve ground users in the downlink transmission of the terahertz (THz) band, utilizing rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) for effective beam division multiplexing. We formulate an optimization problem of maximizing the total system spectral efficiency (SE). This involves optimizing the UAV's transmit beamforming and the common rate of RSMA. By recasting the optimization problem into a Markov decision process (MDP), we propose a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG)-based resource allocation mechanism tailored to capture problem dynamics and optimize its variables. Moreover, given the UAV's frequent mobility and consequential system reconfigurations, we fortify the trained DDPG model with a meta-learning strategy, enhancing its adaptability to system variations. Numerically, more than 20\% energy efficiency gain is achieved by our proposed LAS-aided multi-antenna UAV equipped with 4 lenses, compared to a single-lens UAV. Simulations also demonstrate that at a signal-to-noise (SNR) of 10 dB, the incorporation of RSMA results in a 22\% SE enhancement over conventional orthogonal beam division multiple access. Furthermore, the overall system SE improves by 27\%, when meta-learning is employed for fine-tuning the conventional DDPG method in literature.