Hierarchical Multi-Agent Multi-Armed Bandit for Resource Allocation in Multi-LEO Satellite Constellation Networks

Abstract

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation is capable of providing global coverage area with high-rate services in the next sixth-generation (6G) non-terrestrial network (NTN). Due to limited onboard resources of operating power, beams, and channels, resilient and efficient resource management has become compellingly imperative under complex interference cases. However, different from conventional terrestrial base stations, LEO is deployed at considerable height and under high mobility, inducing substantially long delay and interference during transmission. As a result, acquiring the accurate channel state information between LEOs and ground users is challenging. Therefore, we construct a framework with a two-way transmission under unknown channel information and no data collected at long-delay ground gateway. In this paper, we propose hierarchical multi-agent multi-armed bandit resource allocation for LEO constellation (mmRAL) by appropriately assigning available radio resources. LEOs are considered as collaborative multiple macro-agents attempting unknown trials of various actions of micro-agents of respective resources, asymptotically achieving suitable allocation with only throughput information. In simulations, we evaluate mmRAL in various cases of LEO deployment, serving numbers of users and LEOs, hardware cost and outage probability. Benefited by efficient and resilient allocation, the proposed mmRAL system is capable of operating in homogeneous or heterogeneous orbital planes or constellations, achieving the highest throughput performance compared to the existing benchmarks in open literature.