DRL-Based Spectrum Sharing for RIS-Aided Local High-Quality Wireless Networks

Abstract

This paper investigates a smart spectrum-sharing framework for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided local high-quality wireless networks (LHQWNs) within a mobile network operator (MNO) ecosystem. Although RISs are often considered harmful due to interference, this work shows that properly controlled RISs can enhance quality of service (QoS). The proposed system enables temporary spectrum access for multiple vertical service providers (VSPs) by dynamically allocating radio resources. The spectrum is divided into dedicated subchannels assigned to individual VSPs and reusable subchannels shared among multiple VSPs, while RIS improves propagation conditions and zero-forcing (ZF) precoding is adopted at the multiantenna base station (BS) to cancel inter-user interference. We formulate a multi-VSP utility maximization problem that jointly optimizes subchannel assignment, transmit power, and RIS phase configuration while accounting for spectrum access costs, RIS leasing costs, and QoS constraints. The resulting mixed-integer non-linear program (MINLP) is modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP) and solved using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) and soft actor-critic (SAC) algorithms are developed and compared. Numerical results show that SAC generally outperforms DDPG in convergence, stability, and utility, particularly in larger-scale scenarios. In the reduced-scale ablation study, both joint DRL methods outperform the heuristic benchmark by at least 6.6% in final moving-average reward.