Graph Neural Network-Based Multicast Routing for On-Demand Streaming Services in 6G Networks
This addresses the need for scalable and efficient multicast routing to support heterogeneous user demands in 6G networks, representing an incremental improvement over existing neural network-based approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of intelligent multicast routing for bandwidth-intensive applications in 6G networks by proposing a GNN-based framework that minimizes transmission cost and supports user-specific QoS, achieving results that closely approximate optimal solutions while reducing computational complexity and generalizing to large-scale, dynamic topologies.
The increase of bandwidth-intensive applications in sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks, such as real-time volumetric streaming and multi-sensory extended reality, demands intelligent multicast routing solutions capable of delivering differentiated quality-of-service (QoS) at scale. Traditional shortest-path and multicast routing algorithms are either computationally prohibitive or structurally rigid, and they often fail to support heterogeneous user demands, leading to suboptimal resource utilization. Neural network-based approaches, while offering improved inference speed, typically lack topological generalization and scalability. To address these limitations, this paper presents a graph neural network (GNN)-based multicast routing framework that jointly minimizes total transmission cost and supports user-specific video quality requirements. The routing problem is formulated as a constrained minimum-flow optimization task, and a reinforcement learning algorithm is developed to sequentially construct efficient multicast trees by reusing paths and adapting to network dynamics. A graph attention network (GAT) is employed as the encoder to extract context-aware node embeddings, while a long short-term memory (LSTM) module models the sequential dependencies in routing decisions. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed method closely approximates optimal dynamic programming-based solutions while significantly reducing computational complexity. The results also confirm strong generalization to large-scale and dynamic network topologies, highlighting the method's potential for real-time deployment in 6G multimedia delivery scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/UNIC-Lab/GNN-Routing.