English

Learning Random Access Schemes for Massive Machine-Type Communication with MARL

Information Theory 2023-02-16 v1 Networking and Internet Architecture math.IT

Abstract

In this paper, we explore various multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) techniques to design grant-free random access (RA) schemes for low-complexity, low-power battery operated devices in massive machine-type communication (mMTC) wireless networks. We use value decomposition networks (VDN) and QMIX algorithms with parameter sharing (PS) with centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) while maintaining scalability. We then compare the policies learned by VDN, QMIX, and deep recurrent Q-network (DRQN) and explore the impact of including the agent identifiers in the observation vector. We show that the MARL-based RA schemes can achieve a better throughput-fairness trade-off between agents without having to condition on the agent identifiers. We also present a novel correlated traffic model, which is more descriptive of mMTC scenarios, and show that the proposed algorithm can easily adapt to traffic non-stationarities

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.07837,
  title  = {Learning Random Access Schemes for Massive Machine-Type Communication with MARL},
  author = {Muhammad Awais Jadoon and Adriano Pastore and Monica Navarro and Alvaro Valcarce},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.07837},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

15 pages, 10 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:41:01.168Z