top of page
Publications Header 2.png

Publications & Journals

Self-play Learning Strategies for Resource Assignment in Open-RAN Networks

Citation:

Wang, X., Thomas, J.D., Piechocki, R.J., Kapoor, S., Santos-Rodriguez, R. and Parekh, A., (2021) Self-play Learning Strategies for Resource Assignment in Open-RAN Networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.02649.

Published:

03/03/2021

Link:

University:

University of Bristol

Abstract: 

Open Radio Access Network (ORAN) is being developed with an aim to democratise access and lower the cost of future mobile data networks, supporting network services with various QoS requirements, such as massive IoT and URLLC. In ORAN, network functionality is dis-aggregated into remote units (RUs), distributed units (DUs) and central units (CUs), which allows flexible software on Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) deployments. Furthermore, the mapping of variable RU requirements to local mobile edge computing centres for future centralized processing would significantly reduce the power consumption in cellular networks. In this paper, we study the RU-DU resource assignment problem in an ORAN system, modelled as a 2D bin packing problem. A deep reinforcement learning-based self-play approach is proposed to achieve efficient RU-DU resource management, with AlphaGo Zero inspired neural Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). Experiments on representative 2D bin packing environment and real sites data show that the self-play learning strategy achieves intelligent RU-DU resource assignment for different network conditions.

Bristol (web).png
Cambridge (web).png
Lancaster (web).png
Surrey (web).png
UKRI (web).png
BT 2 (web).png
bottom of page