DRL驱动的多模态语义通信与URLLC共存网络动态资源分配

DRL-driven dynamic resource allocation for multimodal semantic communication and URLLC coexistence networks

  • 摘要: 针对下一代无线网络中多模态语义通信与超可靠低时延通信(Ultra-reliable and low-latency communications,URLLC)业务在下行正交频分多址(Orthogonal frequency division multiple access,OFDMA)系统中并存导致的频谱资源竞争问题,本文研究了如何在满足URLLC严格时延约束的同时,最大化语义用户的体验质量(Quality of experience,QoE). 提出了一种基于深度强化学习(Deep reinforcement learning,DRL)的重要性感知的动态资源打孔方案. 首先,为了解决传统比特级资源分配无法适配语义任务特性的问题,引入基于集成梯度(Integrated gradients,IG)的归因分析方法,建立细粒度的语义到物理资源映射模型,量化语义特征对下游智能任务精度的贡献度,并构建语义特征重要性权重矩阵. 其次,建立语义通信与URLLC共存模型,将复杂的非凸组合优化问题解耦为信道分配与动态打孔两个子问题:在信道分配阶段,基于语义用户速率需求采用传统算法进行预分配. 在打孔阶段,将问题建模为马尔可夫决策过程(Markov decision process,MDP),设计了基于近端策略优化(Proximal policy optimization,PPO)算法的智能体. 该智能体根据实时语义特征重要性、剩余允许打孔次数及URLLC队列状态,动态决策URLLC数据包的传输位置,在避免破坏关键语义信息与保障URLLC时延之间寻找最优策略. 仿真结果表明,与随机打孔及贪心策略相比,所提算法能够精确识别并避开高权重语义资源块,在不同URLLC流量强度及语义压缩比下,均能保持最低的语义中断百分比和较高的平均总奖励,实现了异构业务间资源的高效动态调配.

     

    Abstract: The coexistence of multimodal semantic communication and ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) creates a resource management challenge for next-generation wireless networks. Semantic communication reduces transmission redundancy by delivering task-relevant information rather than complete bit streams, whereas URLLC services require immediate scheduling and strict latency guarantees. When these two types of traffic share the same downlink orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) system, bursty URLLC packets may need to puncture the resource blocks originally allocated to semantic users. Although such puncturing can satisfy the urgent URLLC transmission requirements, it may also damage semantic features and degrade the performance of downstream intelligent tasks. Therefore, an effective scheduling mechanism should not only respond to URLLC traffic in real time but also distinguish the unequal importance of semantic information carried by different physical resources. This study investigates the dynamic resource allocation problem in a multimodal semantic communication and URLLC coexistence network, with the aim of maximizing the quality of experience (QoE) of semantic users while satisfying URLLC latency constraints. To this end, an importance-aware dynamic resource-puncturing scheme based on deep reinforcement learning is proposed. To overcome the limitations of conventional bit-level resource allocation, an integrated gradient (IG)-based attribution method is introduced to evaluate the contribution of semantic features to the final task output. The obtained feature importance values are mapped onto physical resource blocks to form a semantic importance weight matrix. This matrix enables the scheduler to identify the resource blocks carrying critical semantic features and avoid puncturing them whenever possible. The original optimization problem was formulated by jointly considering the semantic transmission rate, semantic distortion, channel allocation, power constraints, puncturing exclusivity, and URLLC delay requirements. Because the problem is nonconvex and combinatorial, it is decomposed into two subproblems. In the first stage, the channel and power resources are pre-allocated to semantic users according to their rate requirements. In the second stage, the dynamic puncturing decision caused by URLLC packet arrival is modeled as a Markov decision process. The system state includes the URLLC queue length, waiting time of the head-of-line packet, semantic importance matrix, and remaining puncturing tolerance of semantic users. Based on this state information, a proximal policy optimization (PPO) agent learns whether to puncture each minislot and which frequency resource should be selected for URLLC transmission. A reward function was designed to reflect the tradeoff between semantic service protection and URLLC latency satisfaction. It penalizes excessive puncturing, unacceptable semantic distortion, and URLLC packet timeouts, thereby guiding the agent to avoid highly important semantic resource blocks while transmitting urgent URLLC packets within the required delay bounds. In addition, by observing the remaining puncturing budget, the agent learns to distribute the puncturing pressure among different semantic users instead of repeatedly damaging the same user’s resources. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed IG-assisted PPO method achieves a better overall performance than random puncturing, several greedy heuristics, double deep Q-network, PPO without IG, and attention-assisted PPO. Under different URLLC arrival probabilities and semantic compression ratios, the proposed method maintains the lowest semantic outage percentage and achieves the highest average total reward. The training curves also exhibit stable convergence behavior in terms of policy loss, value loss, Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence, and policy entropy. Furthermore, image classification experiments on the STL-10 dataset confirm that the proposed method preserves the downstream task accuracy with increasing URLLC traffic intensity better than the other methods. These results indicate that combining semantic feature attribution with reinforcement learning is an effective solution for dynamic resource allocation in semantic–URLLC coexistence networks.

     

/

返回文章
返回