Federated Multi-Agent DRL for Radio Resource Management in Industrial 6G in-X subnetworks

TL;DR

This paper proposes federated multi-agent deep reinforcement learning techniques for dynamic channel allocation in 6G in-X subnetworks within industrial environments, improving interference management while preserving data privacy.

Contribution

Introduces two novel federated multi-agent DRL algorithms, F-MADDQN and F-MADPPO, for interference mitigation in 6G in-X subnetworks, with enhanced privacy and robustness.

Findings

Achieved better performance than baseline schemes.

Reduced signaling overhead significantly.

Demonstrated robustness to deployment density changes.

Abstract

Recently, 6G in-X subnetworks have been proposed as low-power short-range radio cells to support localized extreme wireless connectivity inside entities such as industrial robots, vehicles, and the human body. Deployment of in-X subnetworks within these entities may result in rapid changes in interference levels and thus, varying link quality. This paper investigates distributed dynamic channel allocation to mitigate inter-subnetwork interference in dense in-factory deployments of 6G in-X subnetworks. This paper introduces two new techniques, Federated Multi-Agent Double Deep Q-Network (F-MADDQN) and Federated Multi-Agent Deep Proximal Policy Optimization (F-MADPPO), for channel allocation in 6G in-X subnetworks. These techniques are based on a client-to-server horizontal federated reinforcement learning framework. The methods require sharing only local model weights with a centralized gNB for federated aggregation thereby preserving local data privacy and security. Simulations were conducted using a practical indoor factory environment proposed by 5G-ACIA and 3GPP models for in-factory environments. The results showed that the proposed methods achieved slightly better performance than baseline schemes with significantly reduced signaling overhead compared to the baseline solutions. The schemes also showed better robustness and generalization ability to changes in deployment densities and propagation parameters.