Distributed resource allocation with multi-agent deep reinforcement learning for 5G-V2V communication

We consider the distributed resource selection problem in Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication in the absence of a base station. Each vehicle autonomously selects transmission resources from a pool of shared resources to disseminate Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs). This is a consensus problem where each vehicle has to select a unique resource. The problem becomes more challenging when---due to mobility---the number of vehicles in vicinity of each other is changing dynamically. In a congested scenario, allocation of unique resources for each vehicle becomes infeasible and a congested resource allocation strategy has to be developed. The standardized approach in 5G, namely semi-persistent scheduling (SPS) suffers from effects caused by spatial distribution of the vehicles. In our approach, we turn this into an advantage. We propose a novel Distributed Resource Allocation mechanism using multi-agent reinforcement Learning (DIRAL) which builds on a unique state representation. One challenging issue is to cope with the non-stationarity introduced by concurrently learning agents which causes convergence problems in multi-agent learning systems. We aimed to tackle non-stationarity with unique state representation. Specifically, we deploy view-based positional distribution as a state representation to tackle non-stationarity and perform complex joint behavior in a distributed fashion. Our results showed that DIRAL improves PRR by 20% compared to SPS in challenging congested scenarios.