학술논문

Meta-Scheduling Framework With Cooperative Learning Toward Beyond 5G
Document Type
Periodical
Author
Source
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun. Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Journal on. 41(6):1810-1824 Jun, 2023
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Cellular networks
5G mobile communication
Task analysis
Quality of service
Resource management
Dynamic scheduling
Vehicle dynamics
cooperative learning
deep reinforcement learning
meta-learning
meta-scheduling
Language
ISSN
0733-8716
1558-0008
Abstract
In this paper, we propose a novel meta-scheduling framework with cooperative learning that fully exploits a functional split structure of the base station (BS) consisting of a central unit (CU) and digital units (DUs). To this end, we first design a meta-scheduling policy structure to find a scheduling strategy that can be applied to any BS regardless of BS-specific characteristics such as the number of users, various quality-of-service requirements, and the number of resource blocks. In the proposed framework, the CU only needs to manage objective-specific meta-scheduling policies in a centralized manner while each DU performs scheduling in a decentralized manner by simply using the policy at the CU without any responsibility to manage or train policies. Besides, the policies at the CU can be cooperatively trained using the experiences obtained from all DUs. Therefore, the proposed framework not only provides computational efficiency but also supports network scalability. We show via experiments that the proposed meta-scheduling framework achieves competitive performances compared with the near-optimal conventional schedulers tailored to each BS even though it manages and exploits only one meta-scheduling policy for each objective. Furthermore, our meta-scheduling framework effectively adapts to the change of BS-specific characteristics.