A DL-Enabled Relay Node Placement and Selection Framework in Multicellular Networks

The ever-increasing and diverse user demands as well as the need for uninterrupted access to the medium with minimum latency in dense machine type communication networks, are the key driving forces to a holistic network redesign. In this context, fifth-generation and beyond (5G/B5G) networks, incorporate various advanced physical layer techniques, such as relaying-assisted transmission, aiming to improve network performance hl and extend the coverage area of multicellular orientations. However, the deployment of such techniques in a cellular environment characterized by high interference levels and multi-variate channel representations, leads to increased computational complexity for radio resource management (RRM) tasks. Machine learning (ML), and especially Deep Learning (DL), is proposed as an efficient way to support end-to-end user applications in highly complex environments, since ML/DL models can relax the R hl RM-associated computational burden. In this paper, we consider the joint problem of relay node (RN) placement and selection subject to subcarrier allocation and power management constraints in 5G/B5G hl networks. Various DL-based methods are examined and combined to solve both sub-problems. The performance of these schemes is evaluated for various relaying-assisted transmission approaches, hl either considering known channel state information (CSI) or not. According to the derived results, total system energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency (SE) can be improved by up to 30%, when considering only the DL-based RN placement scheme compared to state-of-the-art non-ML schemes. The deployment of the reinforcement learning (RL) model for RN selection, can improve EE up to 80%, while SE can be improved up to 75%, compared to a system with only DL-enabled RN placement.