Learning-based Intelligent Surface Configuration, User Selection, Channel Allocation, and Modulation Adaptation for Jamming-resisting Multiuser OFDMA Systems

Abstract: Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) can potentially combat jamming attacks by diffusing jamming signals. This paper jointly optimizes user selection, channel allocation, modulation-coding, and RIS configuration in a multiuser OFDMA system under a jamming attack. This problem is non-trivial and has never been addressed, because of its mixed-integer programming nature and difficulties in acquiring channel state information (CSI) involving the RIS and jammer. We propose a new deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach, which learns only through changes in the received data rates of the users to reject the jamming signals and maximize the sum rate of the system. The key idea is that we decouple the discrete selection of users, channels, and modulation-coding from the continuous RIS configuration, hence facilitating the RIS configuration with the latest twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3) model. Another important aspect is that we show a winner-takes-all strategy is almost surely optimal for selecting the users, channels, and modulation-coding, given a learned RIS configuration. Simulations show that the new approach converges fast to fulfill the benefit of the RIS, due to its substantially small state and action spaces. Without the need of the CSI, the approach is promising and offers practical value.