Joint Resource Management for MC-NOMA: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach
It addresses resource allocation challenges in wireless communication networks, offering a flexible solution for user service requirements, but appears incremental as it builds on existing DRL methods.
This paper tackles joint resource management in multi-carrier non-orthogonal multiple access systems by proposing a deep reinforcement learning approach that decouples the problem into subcarrier assignment and power allocation subtasks, achieving superior system throughput and interference resistance compared to existing methods, especially with many users and strong interference.
This paper presents a novel and effective deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach to addressing joint resource management (JRM) in a practical multi-carrier non-orthogonal multiple access (MC-NOMA) system, where hardware sensitivity and imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) are considered. We first formulate the JRM problem to maximize the weighted-sum system throughput. Then, the JRM problem is decoupled into two iterative subtasks: subcarrier assignment (SA, including user grouping) and power allocation (PA). Each subtask is a sequential decision process. Invoking a deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm, our proposed DRL-based JRM (DRL-JRM) approach jointly performs the two subtasks, where the optimization objective and constraints of the subtasks are addressed by a new joint reward and internal reward mechanism. A multi-agent structure and a convolutional neural network are adopted to reduce the complexity of the PA subtask. We also tailor the neural network structure for the stability and convergence of DRL-JRM. Corroborated by extensive experiments, the proposed DRL-JRM scheme is superior to existing alternatives in terms of system throughput and resistance to interference, especially in the presence of many users and strong inter-cell interference. DRL-JRM can flexibly meet individual service requirements of users.