Graph-Neural Multi-Agent Coordination for Distributed Access-Point Selection in Cell-Free Massive MIMO

TL;DR

This paper presents APS-GNN, a scalable distributed multi-agent reinforcement learning framework using graph neural networks for access point selection in cell-free massive MIMO, reducing power consumption and latency.

Contribution

Introduces APS-GNN, a novel multi-agent GNN-based framework for distributed access point selection that improves scalability, efficiency, and latency in CFmMIMO systems.

Findings

APS-GNN activates 50-70% fewer APs than baselines.

Achieves target spectral efficiency with lower power consumption.

Provides one to two orders of magnitude lower inference latency.

Abstract

Cell-free massive MIMO (CFmMIMO) systems require scalable and reliable distributed coordination mechanisms to operate under stringent communication and latency constraints. A central challenge is the Access Point Selection (APS) problem, which seeks to determine the subset of serving Access Points (APs) for each User Equipment (UE) that can satisfy UEs' Spectral Efficiency (SE) requirements while minimizing network power consumption. We introduce APS-GNN, a scalable distributed multi-agent learning framework that decomposes APS into agents operating at the granularity of individual AP-UE connections. Agents coordinate via local observation exchange over a novel Graph Neural Network (GNN) architecture and share parameters to reuse their knowledge and experience. APS-GNN adopts a constrained reinforcement learning approach to provide agents with explicit observability of APS' conflicting objectives, treating SE satisfaction as a cost and power reduction as a reward. Both signals are defined locally, facilitating effective credit assignment and scalable coordination in large networks. To further improve training stability and exploration efficiency, the policy is initialized via supervised imitation learning from a heuristic APS baseline. We develop a realistic CFmMIMO simulator and demonstrate that APS-GNN delivers the target SE while activating 50-70% fewer APs than heuristic and centralized Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) baselines in different evaluation scenarios. Moreover, APS-GNN achieves one to two orders of magnitude lower inference latency than centralized MARL approaches due to its fully parallel and distributed execution. These results establish APS-GNN as a practical and scalable solution for APS in large-scale CFmMIMO networks.