RIS-Aided Proactive Mobile Network Downlink Interference Suppression: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

A proactive mobile network (PMN) is a novel architecture enabling extremely low-latency communication. This architecture employs an open-loop transmission mode that prohibits all real-time control feedback processes and employs virtual cell technology to allocate resources non-exclusively to users. However, such a design also results in significant potential user interference and worsens the communication’s reliability. In this paper, we propose introducing multi-reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology into the downlink process of the PMN to increase the network’s capacity against interference. Since the PMN environment is complex and time varying and accurate channel state information cannot be acquired in real time, it is challenging to manage RISs to service the PMN effectively. We begin by formulating an optimization problem for RIS phase shifts and reflection coefficients. Furthermore, motivated by recent developments in deep reinforcement learning (DRL), we propose an asynchronous advantage actor–critic (A3C)-based method for solving the problem by appropriately designing the action space, state space, and reward function. Simulation results indicate that deploying RISs within a region can significantly facilitate interference suppression. The proposed A3C-based scheme can achieve a higher capacity than baseline schemes and approach the upper limit as the number of RISs increases.