Title
Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Adaptive User Association In Heterogeneous Networks
Abstract
Nowadays, lots of technical challenges emerge focusing on user association in ever-increasingly complicated 5G heterogeneous networks. With distributed multiple attribute decision making (MADM) algorithm, users tend to maximize their utilities selfishly for lack of cooperation, leading to congestion. Therefore, it is efficient to apply artificial intelligence to deal with these emerging problems, which enables users to learn with incomplete environment information. In this paper, we propose an adaptive user association approach based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (RL), considering various user equipment types and femtocell access mechanisms. It aims to achieve a desirable trade-off between Quality of Experience (QoE) and load balancing. We formulate user association as a Markov Decision Process. And a deep RL approach, semi-distributed deep Q-network (DQN), is exploited to get the optimal strategy. Individual reward is defined as a function of transmission rate and base station load, which are adaptively balanced by a designed weight. Simulation results reveal that DQN with adaptive weight achieves the highest average reward compared with DQN with fixed weight and MADM, which indicates it obtains the best trade-off between QoE and load balancing. Compared with MADM, our approach improves by 4% similar to 11%, 32% similar to 40%, 99% in terms of QoE, load balancing and blocking probability, respectively. Furthermore, semi-distributed framework reduces computational complexity.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1007/978-3-030-06161-6_6
COMMUNICATIONS AND NETWORKING, CHINACOM 2018
Keywords
Field
DocType
Heterogeneous networks, User association, Multi-agent Deep Q-network
Femtocell,Mathematical optimization,Load balancing (computing),Computer science,Markov decision process,Computer network,User equipment,Quality of experience,Heterogeneous network,Computational complexity theory,Reinforcement learning
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
262
1867-8211
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
9
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Weiwen Yi100.68
Xing Zhang260341.16
Wenbo Wang3593.04
Jing Li4174.27