An Autonomous Transmission Scheme Using Dueling DQN for D2D Communication Networks

In this paper, we investigate device-to-device (D2D) communication networks which are one of the key technologies for next-generation mobile communication networks and many other applications such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), and Internet of things (IoT). The overlay D2D communication networks that are considered in our study use dedicated radio resources separate from what cellular networks use and there exists co-channel interference in D2D networks without cross-channel interference between two networks. We propose a new transmission scheme for overlay D2D networks that uses a dueling deep reinforcement learning (DRL) architecture. The DRL is especially effective in environments where actions do not affect subsequent states as in wireless communication networks. The main contribution of this paper is that the proposed architecture is designed to utilize only information that each D2D devices can easily obtain by measuring channels. The proposed scheme thus enables D2D devices to train their own neural networks and to decide autonomously whether to transmit data without any intervention from infrastructures. The performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed in terms of average sum-rates and is compared to three baseline schemes. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve almost optimal sum-rates with low signal-to-noise (SNR) values without any intervention from infrastructure.