Deep Reinforcement Learning for Mobile 5G and Beyond: Fundamentals, Applications, and Challenges

Future-generation wireless networks (5G and beyond) must accommodate surging growth in mobile data traffic and support an increasingly high density of mobile users involving a variety of services and applications. Meanwhile, the networks become increasingly dense, heterogeneous, decentralized, and ad hoc in nature, and they encompass numerous and diverse network entities. Consequently, different objectives, such as high throughput and low latency, need to be achieved in terms of service, and resource allocation must be designed and optimized accordingly. However, considering the dynamics and uncertainty that inherently exist in wireless network environments, conventional approaches for service and resource management that require complete and perfect knowledge of the systems are inefficient or even inapplicable. Inspired by the success of machine learning in solving complicated control and decision-making problems, in this article we focus on deep reinforcement- learning (DRL)-based approaches that allow network entities to learn and build knowledge about the networks and thus make optimal decisions locally and independently. We first overview fundamental concepts of DRL and then review related works that use DRL to address various issues in 5G networks. Finally, we present an application of DRL for 5G network slicing optimization. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves superior performance compared with baseline solutions.