Awesome

NetMind - Baseband Function Placement with GCN Encoding and Maze-solving DRL for advanced RAN

This work has been accepted by IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference 2024. It is supported by the UK-funded project REASON and TUDOR under the Future Open Networks Research Challenge sponsored by DSIT.

A Brief Description

The disaggregated and hierarchical architecture of advanced RAN presents significant challenges in efficiently placing baseband functions and user plane functions in conjunction with Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) to accommodate diverse 5G services. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel approach NetMind, which leverages Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to determine the function placement strategies in RANs with diverse topologies, aiming at minimizing power consumption. NetMind formulates the function placement problem as a maze-solving task, enabling a Markov Decision Process with standardized action space scales across different networks. Additionally, a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based encoding mechanism is introduced, allowing features from different networks to be aggregated into a single RL agent. That facilitates the RL agent's generalization capability and minimizes the negative impact of retraining on power consumption. In an example with three sub-networks, NetMind achieves comparable performance to traditional methods that require a dedicated DRL agent for each network, resulting in a 70% reduction in training costs. Furthermore, it demonstrates a substantial 32.76% improvement in power savings and a 41.67% increase in service stability compared to benchmarks from the existing literature.

Handbook

For ease of reuse, the code is containerized and you can simply go inside the container by using the docker and Dev Containers inserts.

Otherwise, you can also run the code based on related required dependents, listed in the requirements.txt

To use the code, there are two folders in src/SFC, namely CODER and DRL. CODER consists the the GCN-based encoder and decoder. 'src/SFC/CODER/EDcode/Network_x/data_generate_x.py' generates the data and 'src/SFC/CODER/EDcode/Network_x/meta_x.py' trains and saves the encoders for reuse in the DRL training process.

Then DRL includes the agent and environment. It is realized based on the Open AI Gym, and you can find the maze in 'src/SFC/DRL/maze/maze/envs/SfcEnv.py' and the main file in 'src/SFC/DRL/maze/main.py'

Refer to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd4RrN-FTWY for setting up a gym-based environment. It's a good tutorial.

If you find this work useful, it would be appreciated if you could cite it by:

@article{li2024netmind,
title={NetMind: Adaptive RAN Baseband Function Placement by GCN Encoding and Maze-solving DRL},
author={Li, Haiyuan and Li, Peizheng and Assis, Karcius Day and Aijaz, Adnan and Shen, Sen and Nejabati, Reza and Yan, Shuangyi and Simeonidou, Dimitra},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.06722},
year={2024}
}