Graph-Based Learning in Core and Edge Virtualized O-RAN for Handling Real-Time AI Workloads

Abstract

AI-empowered applications have been deployed in many aspects of networking, and federated learning (FL) has emerged as a complementary approach due to its ability to enable privacy-preserving model training and inference. However, without self-organizing capability, practical FL systems face several issues to co-exist in real-time networking. Therefore, this paper aims to design autonomous FL management with integrated graph neural networks (GNN) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL), namely AutoFedGDRL, to sustain heterogeneous FL execution in optimized open radio access network (O-RAN) and intelligent core network architectures and offer automated policy-driven orchestration by intelligent agent controller. Edge cloud virtualized O-RAN is integrated to assist model computation and support multiple services with elastic containerized resource scaling. The practicability of FL systems is stimulated by modelling the participants and aggregators as a graph representation and subsequently analyzing to predict the accessibility and trustworthiness of the nodes, bandwidth capacities, and virtual link relationship. Our proposed AutoFedGDRL aims to obtain specifications of hidden FL, service, and networking states in order to control the main policies, such as training management, resource sharing, aggregation scheduling, and service prioritization. In the experiment, AutoFedGDRL surpassed reference models (non-federated training) in global accuracy, achieving 98.23% for MNIST and 97.12% for CIFAR-10, compared to 98.22% and 95.89% for PrimaryGNN-FL. The proposed scheme also improved end-to-end convergence speed, with execution times 10.58 ms to 32.79 ms faster. Model delivery ratios reached 99.98%, ensuring the federated system's reliability and sharing workload efficiency.