Intelligent Resource Allocation for IRS-Enhanced OFDM Communication Systems: A Hybrid Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems have been widely applied in practice since OFDM has diverse outstanding advantages. However, their performance improvement is confronted with bottlenecks. In this paper, in order to tackle this issue, intelligent resource allocation driven by reinforcement learning is studied in intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) enhanced OFDM systems. The system sum rate is maximized by jointly optimizing the subcarrier allocation, the transmit beamforming of the base station and the phase shift of the IRS. An intelligent resource allocation scheme based on combining deep Q networks (DQN) and deep deterministic policy-gradient (DDPG) is proposed to tackle the formulated challenging non-convex problems. In order to further improve the spectrum efficiency, spectrum sharing is considered in the IRS-enhanced OFDM system. The secondary users sum rate maximization framework is formulated by jointly optimizing the channel allocation, the transmit beamforming of the secondary base station (SBS) and the phase shift of the IRS. Dueling double deep Q networks (D3QN) and twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3) are exploited to tackle the hybrid action space issue under interference. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed schemes can significantly improve the transmission rate compared to the benchmark schemes.