AWaRe-SAC: Proactive Slice Admission Control under Weather-Induced Capacity Uncertainty

As emerging applications demand higher throughput and lower latencies, operators are increasingly deploying millimeter-wave (mmWave) links within x-haul transport networks, spanning fronthaul, midhaul, and backhaul segments. However, the inherent susceptibility of mmWave frequencies to weather-related attenuation, particularly rain fading, complicates the maintenance of stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. This creates a critical challenge: making admission decisions under uncertainty regarding future network capacity. To address this, we develop a proactive slice admission control framework for mmWave x-haul networks subject to rain-induced fluctuations. Our objective is to improve network performance, ensure QoS, and optimize revenue, thereby surpassing the limitations of standard reactive approaches. The proposed framework integrates a deep learning predictor of future network conditions with a proactive Q-learning-based slice admission control mechanism. We validate our solution using real-world data from a mmWave x-haul deployment in a dense urban area, incorporating realistic models of link capacity attenuation and dynamic slice demands. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our proactive solution achieves 2-3x higher long-term average revenue under dynamic link conditions, providing a scalable and resilient framework for adaptive admission control.

Switching in the Rain: Predictive Wireless x-haul Network Reconfiguration

Wireless x-haul networks rely on microwave and millimeter-wave links between 4G and/or 5G base-stations to support ultra-high data rate and ultra-low latency. A major challenge associated with these high frequency links is their susceptibility to weather conditions. In particular, precipitation may cause severe signal attenuation, which significantly degrades the network performance. In this paper, we develop a Predictive Network Reconfiguration (PNR) framework that uses historical data to predict the future condition of each link and then prepares the network ahead of time for imminent disturbances. The PNR framework has two components: (i) an Attenuation Prediction (AP) mechanism; and (ii) a Multi-Step Network Reconfiguration (MSNR) algorithm. The AP mechanism employs an encoder-decoder Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to predict the sequence of future attenuation levels of each link. The MSNR algorithm leverages these predictions to dynamically optimize routing and admission control decisions aiming to maximize network utilization, while preserving max-min fairness among the base-stations sharing the network and preventing transient congestion that may be caused by re-routing. We train, validate, and evaluate the PNR framework using a dataset containing over 2 million measurements collected from a real-world city-scale backhaul network. The results show that the framework: (i) predicts attenuation with high accuracy, with an RMSE of less than 0.4 dB for a prediction horizon of 50 seconds; and (ii) can improve the instantaneous network utilization by more than 200% when compared to reactive network reconfiguration algorithms that cannot leverage information about future disturbances.