Toward Blockage-Resilient 6G-V2X Connectivity: Semi-Distributed Bandit with Dynamic Arm Set for mmWave HetNets

Abstract

The vision for 6G vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications demands reliable, adaptive connectivity for fully autonomous driving across complex dynamic environments. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) user association (UA) in heterogeneous vehicular networks presents a particularly demanding instance of this problem, where dynamic blockages and rapid channel variations continuously undermine the stationary reward assumptions of traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) frameworks. This paper proposes a fully distributed blockage-aware non-stationary dynamic bandit algorithm (BAND) and its semi-distributed extension S-BAND for cooperative learning across vehicles. Blockage prediction is incorporated into the change-detection (CD) mechanism to suppress false alarms, while a dynamic base station (BS) set management scheme balances exploration and exploitation across large-scale BS deployments without requiring centralized channel state information (CSI) acquisition or offline training. In S-BAND, vehicles accumulate BS reward estimates as local knowledge and periodically upload them to the macro base station (MBS), which aggregates them into cluster-based central knowledge. A trajectory-aligned knowledge (TAK) region is proposed to capture the spatial correlation of mmWave channel characteristics. A knowledge inheritance fidelity (KIF) metric is introduced to quantify knowledge transfer quality. Simulation results on a realistic urban topology show that BAND and S-BAND achieve 34.9% and 59.4% regret reduction relative to a centralized MAB baseline, with performance gains sustained across blockage rates ranging from 10% to 50%. The proposed TAK region consistently outperforms the traditional K-means clustering scheme under both fidelity criteria.