Learning Collaborative Information Dissemination with Graph-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

In modern communication systems, efficient and reliable information dissemination is crucial for supporting critical operations across domains like disaster response, autonomous vehicles, and sensor networks. This paper introduces a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) approach as a significant step forward in achieving more decentralized, efficient, and collaborative solutions. We propose a Decentralized-POMDP formulation for information dissemination, empowering each agent to independently decide on message forwarding. This constitutes a significant paradigm shift from traditional heuristics based on Multi-Point Relay (MPR) selection. Our approach harnesses Graph Convolutional Reinforcement Learning, employing Graph Attention Networks (GAT) with dynamic attention to capture essential network features. We propose two approaches, L-DGN and HL-DGN, which differ in the information that is exchanged among agents. We evaluate the performance of our decentralized approaches, by comparing them with a widely-used MPR heuristic, and we show that our trained policies are able to efficiently cover the network while bypassing the MPR set selection process. Our approach promises a first step toward bolstering the resilience of real-world broadcast communication infrastructures via learned, collaborative information dissemination.