Learn to Schedule (LEASCH): A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Radio Resource Scheduling in the 5G MAC Layer

Abstract

Network management tools are usually inherited from one generation to another. This was successful since these tools have been kept in check and updated regularly to fit new networking goals and service requirements. Unfortunately, new networking services will render this approach obsolete and handcrafting new tools or upgrading the current ones may lead to complicated systems that will be difficult to maintain and improve. Fortunately, recent advances in AI have provided new promising tools that can help solving many network management problems. Following this interesting trend, the current article presents LEASCH, a deep reinforcement learning model able to solve the radio resource scheduling problem in the MAC layer of 5G networks. LEASCH is developed and trained in a sand-box and then deployed in a 5G network. It has been evaluated under different numerology settings. The experimental results show that it is both numerology-agnostic and efficient when compared to conventional baseline methods in many key performance indicators.

Keywords

• 5G
• MAC
• deep reinforcement learning
• scheduling
• resource management