Decentralized Multi-Channel MANET Power Optimization Using Graph Neural Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces MANET-GNN, a graph neural network-based decentralized algorithm for power allocation in multi-channel MANETs, enabling efficient, scalable, and real-time optimization.

Contribution

It presents a novel GNN architecture for decentralized multi-channel power optimization that generalizes across topologies and conditions, outperforming traditional methods.

Findings

MANET-GNN achieves high throughput in diverse scenarios.

The method scales efficiently with network size and number of channels.

It generalizes well across different topologies and channel conditions.

Abstract

The increasing demand for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) calls for decentralized mechanisms that can allocate transmit power across nodes and channels under stringent resource constraints. Existing optimization-based approaches, however, do not account for expected settings where each link includes multiple channels (e.g., multi-band signaling). Motivated by recent advances in machine learning for distributed optimization, we propose MANET-GNN, a graph neural network (GNN)-based algorithm for decentralized power allocation in multi-channel MANETs. MANET-GNN explicitly exploits the network topology, scales efficiently with the number of nodes and frequency bands, generalizes across topologies and channel conditions, and enables near-instantaneous inference suitable for real-time deployment. Our design builds on a constrained optimization formulation and employs a dedicated GNN architecture inspired by message passing, trained via an unsupervised procedure that is robust to noisy channel state information. Numerical evaluations demonstrate that MANET-GNN achieves high-throughput multi-channel communication across diverse MANET scenarios.