Deep Reinforcement Learning for Backhaul Link Selection for Network Slices in IAB Networks

António J. Morgado, Firooz B. Saghezchi*, Pablo Fondo-Ferreiro, Felipe Gil-Castineira, Maria Papaioannou, Kostas Ramantas, Jonathan Rodriguez

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) has been recently proposed by 3GPP to enable network operators to deploy fifth generation (5G) mobile networks with reduced costs. In this paper, we propose to use IAB to build a dynamic wireless backhaul network capable to provide additional capacity to those Base Stations (BS) experiencing congestion momentarily. As the mobile traffic demand varies across time and space, and the number of slice combinations deployed in a BS can be prohibitively high, we propose to use Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to select, from a set of candidate BSs, the one that can provide backhaul capacity for each of the slices deployed in a congested BS. Our results show that a Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN) agent using a fully connected neural network and the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation function with only one hidden layer is capable to perform the BS selection task successfully, without any failure during the test phase, after being trained for around 20 episodes.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationGLOBECOM 2023 - 2023 IEEE Global Communications Conference
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages6267-6272
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9798350310900
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 26 Feb 2024
Event2023 IEEE Global Communications Conference, GLOBECOM 2023 - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Duration: 4 Dec 20238 Dec 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE Global Communications Conference, GLOBECOM
ISSN (Print)2334-0983
ISSN (Electronic)2576-6813

Conference

Conference2023 IEEE Global Communications Conference, GLOBECOM 2023
Country/TerritoryMalaysia
CityKuala Lumpur
Period4/12/238/12/23

Keywords

  • backhaul link selection
  • deep reinforcement learning
  • integrated access and backhaul
  • machine learning
  • network slicing
  • resource allocation

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Deep Reinforcement Learning for Backhaul Link Selection for Network Slices in IAB Networks'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this