Collaborative Multi-BS Power Management for Dense Radio Access Network Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Network energy efficiency is a main pillar in the design and operation of wireless communication systems. In this paper, we investigate a dense radio access network (dense-RAN) capable of radiated power management at the base station (BS). Aiming to improve the long-term network energy efficiency, an optimization problem is formulated by collaboratively managing multi-BSs’ radiated power levels with constraints on the users’ traffic volume and achievable rate. Considering stochastic traffic arrivals at the users and time-varying network interference, we first formulate the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) and then develop a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework based on the cloud-RAN operation scheme. To tackle the trade-off between complexity and performance, the overall optimization of multi-BSs’ energy efficiency with the multiplicative complexity constraint is modeled to achieve near-optimal performance by using a deep Q-network (DQN). In DQN, each BS first maximizes its individual energy efficiency, and then cooperates with other BSs to maximize the overall multi-BSs’ energy efficiency. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can converge faster and enjoy a network energy efficiency improvement by 5% and 10% compared with the benchmarks of the Q-learning and sleep schemes, respectively.