Graph Neural Network-Driven Deep Reinforcement Learning for Scalable RIS Allocation
TL;DR
A scalable framework combining Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for dynamic shared RIS orchestration and introduces a physical topology sparsification strategy that prunes dense channel matrices into a sparse tripartite graph, improving global coverage probability while reducing computational complexity.
Abstract
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) offer a promising paradigm to mitigate blockage and extend millimeter-wave coverage in 6G multi-cell networks. However, dynamically allocating shared RIS infrastructure across competing base stations is an NP-hard problem posing severe scalability bottlenecks. In this paper, we propose a scalable framework combining Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for dynamic shared RIS orchestration. By formulating allocation as a Markov Decision Process, we introduce a physical topology sparsification strategy that prunes dense channel matrices into a sparse tripartite graph. This pruning reduces edge density by 77% and removes representation noise, thereby improving global coverage probability while reducing computational complexity. Our relational message-passing architecture naturally generalizes to arbitrary network dimensions without model retraining. Furthermore, structural ablation studies reveal that physical path loss localizes surface dependencies, enabling a highly efficient localized graph design with linear computational scaling. Extensive simulations in dense urban environments demonstrate that under strict infrastructure budget constraints, the proposed GNN-DRL framework consistently outperforms greedy heuristic baselines by up to ~12% in coverage while delivering faster inference speed via GPU acceleration.
