Online Channel-state Clustering And Multiuser Capacity Learning For Wireless Scheduling

In this paper we propose an online algorithm for clustering channel-states and learning the associated achievable multiuser rates. Our motivation stems from the complexity of multiuser scheduling. For instance, MU-MIMO scheduling involves the selection of a user subset and associated rate selection each time-slot for varying channel states (the vector of quantized channels matrices for each of the users) – a complex integer optimization problem that is different for each channel state. Instead, our algorithm clusters the collection of channel states to a much lower dimension, and for each cluster provides achievable multiuser capacity trade-offs, which can be used for user and rate selection. Our algorithm uses a bandit approach, where it learns both the unknown partitions of the channel-state space (channel-state clustering) as well as the capacity region for each cluster along a pre-specified set of directions, by observing the success/failure of the scheduling decisions (e.g. through packet loss). We propose an epoch-greedy learning algorithm that achieves a sub-linear regret, given access to a class of classifying functions over the channel-state space. Finally, we empirically validate the performance of our algorithm through simulations.