Solving Channel Allocation by Reinforcement Learning in Cognitive Enabled Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a promising technique that improves traffic safety and transportation efficiency and provides a comfortable driving experience. However, due to the rapid growth of applications that demand channel resources, efficient channel allocation schemes are required to utilize the performance of the vehicular networks. In this thesis, two Reinforcement learning (RL)-based channel allocation methods are proposed for a cognitive enabled VANET environment to maximize a long-term average system reward. First, we present a model-based dynamic programming method, which requires the calculations of the transition probabilities and time intervals between decision epochs. After obtaining the transition probabilities and time intervals, a relative value iteration (RVI) algorithm is used to find the asymptotically optimal policy. Then, we propose a model-free reinforcement learning method, in which we employ an agent to interact with the environment iteratively and learn from the feedback to approximate the optimal policy. Simulation results show that our reinforcement learning method can acquire a similar performance to that of the dynamic programming while both outperform the greedy method.