Distributed Online Learning for Time-Critical Communication in 6G Industrial Subnetworks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Abdelrahman, Samira, Farag, Hossam, Berardinelli, Gilberto
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Abdelrahman, Samira
Farag, Hossam
Berardinelli, Gilberto
author_facet Abdelrahman, Samira
Farag, Hossam
Berardinelli, Gilberto
contents 6G industrial in-X subnetworks are expected to support highly time-critical alarm reporting in large-scale environments characterized by mobility, bursty event-driven traffic, and limited radio resources. In such settings, conventional medium access solutions are ill-suited to guarantee reliable delivery of critical traffic, e.g., emergency alarms, within strict deadlines, especially when multiple subnetworks become simultaneously active after a common alarm event, a scenario widely referred as medium access with a shared message. This paper proposes a distributed deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based medium access control protocol for timely alarm transmission in time-critical industrial subnetworks. The proposed method enables each local access point (LAP) to learn, in an online manner, to infer contention conditions from a broadcast contention-signature signal and to autonomously select a transmission pattern over the available channels using a lightweight deep neural network and an (ephsilon)-greedy policy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently achieves a higher probability of in-time alarm delivery than benchmark random-access schemes, while exhibiting better scalability with increasing network density. For instance, the proposed method improves probability of in-time alarm delivery by at least 7% with a network size of 40 subnetworks, while the gain increases to 21% when the number of subnetworks increases to 60.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06437
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distributed Online Learning for Time-Critical Communication in 6G Industrial Subnetworks
Abdelrahman, Samira
Farag, Hossam
Berardinelli, Gilberto
Systems and Control
6G industrial in-X subnetworks are expected to support highly time-critical alarm reporting in large-scale environments characterized by mobility, bursty event-driven traffic, and limited radio resources. In such settings, conventional medium access solutions are ill-suited to guarantee reliable delivery of critical traffic, e.g., emergency alarms, within strict deadlines, especially when multiple subnetworks become simultaneously active after a common alarm event, a scenario widely referred as medium access with a shared message. This paper proposes a distributed deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based medium access control protocol for timely alarm transmission in time-critical industrial subnetworks. The proposed method enables each local access point (LAP) to learn, in an online manner, to infer contention conditions from a broadcast contention-signature signal and to autonomously select a transmission pattern over the available channels using a lightweight deep neural network and an (ephsilon)-greedy policy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently achieves a higher probability of in-time alarm delivery than benchmark random-access schemes, while exhibiting better scalability with increasing network density. For instance, the proposed method improves probability of in-time alarm delivery by at least 7% with a network size of 40 subnetworks, while the gain increases to 21% when the number of subnetworks increases to 60.
title Distributed Online Learning for Time-Critical Communication in 6G Industrial Subnetworks
topic Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06437