A Self-Supervised Learning Approach for Accelerating Wireless Network Optimization

The prevailing issue in multi-hop wireless networking is interference management, which militates against the efficiency of traditional routing and scheduling algorithms. We develop a self-supervised learning approach to address the classic NP-hard problem of capacity optimization over a multi-hop wireless network, where the routing and scheduling decisions are deeply coupled. Our two-stage design leverages historical computation experiences to accelerate the optimization of new problem instances, where an instance represents the application-level input containing network topology, interference model, and other user-level traffic constraints. The first stage, Scheduling Structure Classification (SSC), distills the scheduling structure of the historical optimization instances into an appropriate number of classes, through a properly designed clustering algorithm without prior assumption or knowledge. The second stage uses the instances labelled with class information from the first stage to train an Application Identification (AID) neural network model capable of predicting a future problem instance's scheduling class given its application-level information. When solving the new instance, its predicted scheduling class and the associated scheduling structure are exploited to compute an efficient approximate solution, avoiding the time-consuming iterative search for such scheduling structure as practiced by the conventional approaches. We apply our method to different types of wireless multi-commodity flow problems across various network sizes and disparate flow requirements. The results demonstrate that our method significantly reduces the computation time robustly by at least 70% with only slight loss in the solution quality.