DRL-Based Intelligent Resource Allocation for Diverse QoS in 5G and toward 6G Vehicular Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

Abstract

The vehicular network is taking great attention from both academia and industry to enable the intelligent transportation system (ITS), autonomous driving, and smart cities. The system provides extremely dynamic features due to the fast mobile characteristics. While the number of different applications in the vehicular network is growing fast, the quality of service (QoS) in the 5G vehicular network becomes diverse. One of the most stringent requirements in the vehicular network is a safety-critical real-time system. To guarantee low-latency and other diverse QoS requirements, wireless network resources should be effectively utilized and allocated among vehicles, such as computation power in cloud, fog, and edge servers; spectrum at roadside units (RSUs); and base stations (BSs). Historically, optimization problems have mostly been investigated to formulate resource allocation and are solved by mathematical computation methods. However, the optimization problems are usually nonconvex and hard to be solved. Recently, machine learning (ML) is a powerful technique to cope with the complexity in computation and has capability to cope with big data and data analysis in the heterogeneous vehicular network. In this paper, an overview of resource allocation in the 5G vehicular network is represented with the support of traditional optimization and advanced ML approaches, especially a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method. In addition, a federated deep reinforcement learning- (FDRL-) based vehicular communication is proposed. The challenges, open issues, and future research directions for 5G and toward 6G vehicular networks, are discussed. A multiaccess edge computing assisted by network slicing and a distributed federated learning (FL) technique is analyzed. A FDRL-based UAV-assisted vehicular communication is discussed to point out the future research directions for the networks.