Accelerating Resource Allocation for D2D Communications Using Imitation Learning

Resource allocation for device-to-device (D2D) communications is usually formulated as mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems, which are generally NP-hard and difficult to solve. Traditional methods are based on mathematical optimization techniques, which suffer from forbidding computational complexity or unsatisfactory optimality. In this paper, we introduce a machine leaning (ML) technique, imitation learning, to address the resource allocation in D2D communications. The key idea is learning a good prune policy to speed up the widely-used globally optimal algorithm for the MINLP problems, the branch- and-bound (B&B) algorithm. With appropriate feature selection, imitation learning can be converted into a binary classification problem, which can be solved by the classical support vector machine (SVM). Extensive simulation demonstrates that the proposed method can achieve good optimality and reduce computational complexity simultaneously. It only needs hundreds of training samples and has a good generalization ability. Our proposed method can be also applied to the MINLP problems in other wireless communication networks.