Cognitive Radio Network Throughput Maximization with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Radio Frequency powered Cognitive Radio Networks (RF-CRN) are likely to be the eyes and ears of upcoming modern networks such as Internet of Things (IoT), requiring increased decentralization and autonomous operation. To be considered autonomous, the RF-powered network entities need to make decisions locally to maximize the network throughput under the uncertainty of any network environment. However, in complex and large-scale networks, the state and action spaces are usually large, and existing Tabular Reinforcement Learning technique is unable to find the optimal state- action policy quickly. In this paper, deep reinforcement learning is proposed to overcome the mentioned shortcomings and allow a wireless gateway to derive an optimal policy to maximize network throughput. When benchmarked against advanced DQN techniques, our proposed DQN configuration offers performance speedup of up to 1.8× with good overall performance.