학술논문

Link Scheduling Using Graph Neural Networks
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun. Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on. 22(6):3997-4012 Jun, 2023
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Signal Processing and Analysis
Wireless networks
Processor scheduling
Complexity theory
Scheduling
Optimal scheduling
Ad hoc networks
Routing
MWIS
graph convolutional networks
wireless networks
scheduling
reinforcement learning
Language
ISSN
1536-1276
1558-2248
Abstract
Efficient scheduling of transmissions is a key problem in wireless networks. The main challenge stems from the fact that optimal link scheduling involves solving a maximum weighted independent set (MWIS) problem, which is known to be NP-hard. In practical schedulers, centralized and distributed greedy heuristics are commonly used to approximately solve the MWIS problem. However, most of these greedy heuristics ignore important topological information of the wireless network. To overcome this limitation, we propose fast heuristics based on graph convolutional networks (GCNs) that can be implemented in centralized and distributed manners. Our centralized heuristic is based on tree search guided by a GCN and 1-step rollout. In our distributed MWIS solver, a GCN generates topology-aware node embeddings that are combined with per-link utilities before invoking a distributed greedy solver. Moreover, a novel reinforcement learning scheme is developed to train the GCN in a non-differentiable pipeline. Test results on medium-sized wireless networks show that our centralized heuristic can reach a near-optimal solution quickly, and our distributed heuristic based on a shallow GCN can reduce by nearly half the suboptimality gap of the distributed greedy solver with minimal increase in complexity. The proposed schedulers also exhibit good generalizability across graph and weight distributions.