ZTE Communications ›› 2023, Vol. 21 ›› Issue (2): 61-69.DOI: 10.12142/ZTECOM.202302009

• Special Topic • Previous Articles     Next Articles

RIS-Assisted UAV-D2D Communications Exploiting Deep Reinforcement Learning

YOU Qian1, XU Qian1(), YANG Xin1, ZHANG Tao2, CHEN Ming3   

  1. 1.School of electronics and information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, China
    2.China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, Beijing 100076, China
    3.Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. , Ltd. , Hangzhou 310051, China
  • Received:2023-02-21 Online:2023-06-13 Published:2023-06-13
  • About author:YOU Qian received her BS degree from Yangzhou University, China in 2021. She is currently pursuing her MS degree at the school of electronics and information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China. Her research interests include machine learning for communications, IRS-assisted communications, and UAV-assisted Communications.|XU Qian (qianxu@nwpu.edu.cn) received her BS and PhD degrees both from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. She is currently an associate professor at the school of electronics and information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China. Her current research interests include mobile wireless communications with emphasis on physical layer security and QoS provisioning. She has published more than 20 technical papers.|YANG Xin received his BS degree in communication engineering and MS degree in electronics and communication engineering from Xidian University, China in 2011 and 2014, respectively, and PhD degree in information and communication engineering from Northwestern Polytechnical University, China in 2018. He is an associate professor with school of electronics and information, Northwestern Polytechnical University. His research interests include wireless communications and ad hoc networks.|ZHANG Tao received his MS degree from Nankai University, China. He is currently a senior engineer in China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology. His current research interests mainly focus on wireless communications.|CHEN Ming received his BS degree from Xidian University, China. He is currently a senior engineer in Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co., Ltd. His current research interests mainly focus on intelligent signal processing.
  • Supported by:
    the National Natural Science Foundation of China(62201462)

Abstract:

Device-to-device (D2D) communications underlying cellular networks enabled by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been regarded as promising techniques for next-generation communications. To mitigate the strong interference caused by the line-of-sight (LoS) air-to-ground channels, we deploy a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to rebuild the wireless channels. A joint optimization problem of the transmit power of UAV, the transmit power of D2D users and the RIS phase configuration are investigated to maximize the achievable rate of D2D users while satisfying the quality of service (QoS) requirement of cellular users. Due to the high channel dynamics and the coupling among cellular users, the RIS, and the D2D users, it is challenging to find a proper solution. Thus, a RIS softmax deep double deterministic (RIS-SD3) policy gradient method is proposed, which can smooth the optimization space as well as reduce the number of local optimizations. Specifically, the SD3 algorithm maximizes the reward of the agent by training the agent to maximize the value function after the softmax operator is introduced. Simulation results show that the proposed RIS-SD3 algorithm can significantly improve the rate of the D2D users while controlling the interference to the cellular user. Moreover, the proposed RIS-SD3 algorithm has better robustness than the twin delayed deep deterministic (TD3) policy gradient algorithm in a dynamic environment.

Key words: device-to-device communications, reconfigurable intelligent surface, deep reinforcement learning, softmax deep double deterministic policy gradient