Distributed Scheduling using Graph Neural Networks
Published in IEEE ICASSP 2021, 2021
Recommended citation: Zhongyuan Zhao, Gunjan Verma, Chirag Rao, Ananthram Swami, Santiago Segarra, " Distributed Scheduling Using Graph Neural Networks," IEEE ICASSP 2021, pp. 4720-4724, doi: 10.1109/ICASSP39728.2021.9414098. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP39728.2021.9414098
Abstract
A fundamental problem in the design of wireless networks is to efficiently schedule transmission in a distributed manner. The main challenge stems from the fact that optimal link scheduling involves solving a maximum weighted independent set (MWIS) problem, which is NP-hard. For practical link scheduling schemes, distributed greedy approaches are commonly used to approximate the solution of the MWIS problem. However, these greedy schemes mostly ignore important topological information of the wireless networks. To overcome this limitation, we propose a distributed MWIS solver based on graph convolutional networks (GCNs). In a nutshell, a trainable GCN module learns topology-aware node embeddings that are combined with the network weights before calling a greedy solver. In small- to middle-sized wireless networks with tens of links, even a shallow GCN-based MWIS scheduler can leverage the topological information of the graph to reduce in half the suboptimality gap of the distributed greedy solver with good generalizability across graphs and minimal increase in complexity.
Key words: Maximum weighted independent set; graph convolutional network; wireless network; scheduling
Recommended citation:
Z. Zhao, G. Verma, C. Rao, A. Swami and S. Segarra, “Distributed Scheduling Using Graph Neural Networks,” IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2021, pp. 4720-4724, doi: 10.1109/ICASSP39728.2021.9414098.