NSF Award
2318634
Wireless communication is one of the most important mediums for transmitting information from one device to another. Most of the current wireless phones are supported by either 4G or 5G networks. 5G is meant to deliver higher data speeds, increased availability, and a uniform user experience to multiple users. 5G advanced capabilities will impact several industries including healthcare, education, entertainment, Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, and smart cities. This research aims to create a system that can effectively manage IoT devices connected to the 5G network. Managing a multitude of IoT devices with diverse requirements is a complex task, making manual management challenging. Some devices require fast data transmission for activities like watching videos or playing virtual-reality games, while others need a quick response time for tasks like self-driving cars or monitoring devices. The solution to these problems is network slicing which involves dividing the network into smaller parts to handle different types of devices and services. However, the challenges inherent to network slicing are efficiently managing network resources, coordinating, and optimizing different parts of the network. This project addresses these challenges by designing a system that can automatically manage the resources of 5G-enabled IoT devices. The potential benefits of this approach are that it simplifies the network and reduces cost, saves energy, balances the workload, optimizes mobility, and makes the network easier to manage. This research advances the field by laying a solid groundwork for studying machine learning and network automation in devices that are part of the 5G-enabled IoT network. Furthermore, by employing and mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM, this project will aim to bridge the gap in institutions across the US. This project will train the next generation of scholars from minority-serving universities and marginalized communities and help in workforce development in the fields of 5G and reinforcement learning (RL). The project leaders will also reach out to K-12 to promote education and engage with a diverse range of students, including women.<br/><br/>The goal of this project is to devise a framework for automating end-to-end resource management of 5G-enabled IoT devices that utilizes RL techniques with massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) in large-scale networks. The diverse needs of various use cases, devices, and applications in 5G networks make manual operation costly, difficult, and inefficient. This project will consider agility to ensure that the network can quickly adapt to evolving requirements. It aims to decrease network complexity and cost, conserve network energy, optimize load balancing and mobility, and simplify resource management. The scope of the research is a) designing 5G network slicing using Massive MIMO for IoT devices, b) developing an RL model to solve orchestration problems of IoT devices in large-scale 5G networks, and c) integrating the RL solution into a Massive MIMO network sliced 5G-enabled IoT network. The 5G network-slicing approach will enable resource allocation to each slice considering its specific needs and provide networks-as-a-service by minimizing operational expenses (OPEX) and capital expenditure (CAPEX) by adopting the Massive MIMO technique and RL models. This approach will result in higher availability, a specified latency, faster speed, better security, and higher throughput of RL-enabled Massive MIMO 5G networks.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
