Learning Wireless Interference Patterns: Decoupled GNN for Throughput Prediction in Heterogeneous Multi-Hop p-CSMA Networks

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Main Authors: Tarzjani, Faezeh Dehghan, Krishnamachari, Bhaskar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tarzjani, Faezeh Dehghan
Krishnamachari, Bhaskar
author_facet Tarzjani, Faezeh Dehghan
Krishnamachari, Bhaskar
contents The p-persistent CSMA protocol is central to random-access MAC analysis, but predicting saturation throughput in heterogeneous multi-hop wireless networks remains a hard problem. Simplified models that assume a single, shared interference domain can underestimate throughput by 48-62% in sparse topologies. Exact Markov-chain analyses are accurate but scale exponentially in computation time, making them impractical for large networks. These computational barriers motivate structural machine learning approaches like GNNs for scalable throughput prediction in general network topologies. Yet off-the-shelf GNNs struggle here: a standard GCN yields 63.94% normalized mean absolute error (NMAE) on heterogeneous networks because symmetric normalization conflates a node's direct interference with higher-order, cascading effects that pertain to how interference propagates over the network graph. Building on these insights, we propose the Decoupled Graph Convolutional Network (D-GCN), a novel architecture that explicitly separates processing of a node's own transmission probability from neighbor interference effects. D-GCN replaces mean aggregation with learnable attention, yielding interpretable, per-neighbor contribution weights while capturing complex multihop interference patterns. D-GCN attains 3.3% NMAE, outperforms strong baselines, remains tractable even when exact analytical methods become computationally infeasible, and enables gradient-based network optimization that achieves within 1% of theoretical optima.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_14137
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Wireless Interference Patterns: Decoupled GNN for Throughput Prediction in Heterogeneous Multi-Hop p-CSMA Networks
Tarzjani, Faezeh Dehghan
Krishnamachari, Bhaskar
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
The p-persistent CSMA protocol is central to random-access MAC analysis, but predicting saturation throughput in heterogeneous multi-hop wireless networks remains a hard problem. Simplified models that assume a single, shared interference domain can underestimate throughput by 48-62% in sparse topologies. Exact Markov-chain analyses are accurate but scale exponentially in computation time, making them impractical for large networks. These computational barriers motivate structural machine learning approaches like GNNs for scalable throughput prediction in general network topologies. Yet off-the-shelf GNNs struggle here: a standard GCN yields 63.94% normalized mean absolute error (NMAE) on heterogeneous networks because symmetric normalization conflates a node's direct interference with higher-order, cascading effects that pertain to how interference propagates over the network graph. Building on these insights, we propose the Decoupled Graph Convolutional Network (D-GCN), a novel architecture that explicitly separates processing of a node's own transmission probability from neighbor interference effects. D-GCN replaces mean aggregation with learnable attention, yielding interpretable, per-neighbor contribution weights while capturing complex multihop interference patterns. D-GCN attains 3.3% NMAE, outperforms strong baselines, remains tractable even when exact analytical methods become computationally infeasible, and enables gradient-based network optimization that achieves within 1% of theoretical optima.
title Learning Wireless Interference Patterns: Decoupled GNN for Throughput Prediction in Heterogeneous Multi-Hop p-CSMA Networks
topic Machine Learning
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14137