Mutual-Interference-Aware Throughput Enhancement in Massive IoT: A Graph Reinforcement Learning Framework

Abstract

As the number of devices increases dramatically in the Internet of Things (IoT), features of dense deployment of massive devices generate mutual interference in communication overlapping areas, which will impose an imperative challenge on spectrum resource allocation. To handle this challenge, this article proposes a mutual interference-aware throughput enhancement scheme. For the mutual interference among multiple IoT devices, this scheme first builds an interference hypergraph model to quantify the impact of the mutual interference for each device. According to the main goal of the spectrum resource allocation, this article formulates a graph reinforcement learning (GRL) framework, whose action space is multidimensional discrete, and the reward function is designed to enhance the throughput and mitigate the impact of interference. Then, a graph convolutional network-double dueling deep Q-network-based spectrum resource allocation algorithm is developed upon the proposed GRL framework to extract the mutual interference information from the hypergraph model, and then achieve a dynamic resource allocation for massive IoT. Simulation results prove that the proposed GRL algorithm effectively improves the network throughput compared to the comparison algorithms.