Enhancing Energy Efficiency in O-RAN Through Intelligent xApps Deployment

The proliferation of 5G technology presents an unprecedented challenge in managing the energy consumption of densely deployed network infrastructures, particularly Base Stations (BSs), which account for the majority of power usage in mobile networks. The O-RAN architecture, with its emphasis on open and intelligent design, offers a promising framework to address the Energy Efficiency (EE) demands of modern telecommunication systems. This paper introduces two xApps designed for the O-RAN architecture to optimize power savings without compromising the Quality of Service (QoS). Utilizing a commercial RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) simulator, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed xApps through extensive simulations that reflect real-world operational conditions. Our results show a significant reduction in power consumption, achieving up to 50% power savings with a minimal number of User Equipments (UEs), by intelligently managing the operational state of Radio Cards (RCs), particularly through switching between active and sleep modes based on network resource block usage conditions.

Continuous Transfer Learning for UAV Communication-aware Trajectory Design

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) emerges as a prime solution for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) trajectory planning, offering proficiency in navigating high-dimensional spaces, adaptability to dynamic environments, and making sequential decisions based on real-time feedback. Despite these advantages, the use of DRL for UAV trajectory planning requires significant retraining when the UAV is confronted with a new environment, resulting in wasted resources and time. Therefore, it is essential to develop techniques that can reduce the overhead of retraining DRL models, enabling them to adapt to constantly changing environments. This paper presents a novel method to reduce the need for extensive retraining using a double deep Q network (DDQN) model as a pretrained base, which is subsequently adapted to different urban environments through Continuous Transfer Learning (CTL). Our method involves transferring the learned model weights and adapting the learning parameters, including the learning and exploration rates, to suit each new environment specific characteristics. The effectiveness of our approach is validated in three scenarios, each with different levels of similarity. CTL significantly improves learning speed and success rates compared to DDQN models initiated from scratch. For similar environments, Transfer Learning (TL) improved stability, accelerated convergence by 65%, and facilitated 35% faster adaptation in dissimilar settings.