AWaRe-SAC: Proactive Slice Admission Control under Weather-Induced Capacity Uncertainty

As emerging applications demand higher throughput and lower latencies, operators are increasingly deploying millimeter-wave (mmWave) links within x-haul transport networks, spanning fronthaul, midhaul, and backhaul segments. However, the inherent susceptibility of mmWave frequencies to weather-related attenuation, particularly rain fading, complicates the maintenance of stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. This creates a critical challenge: making admission decisions under uncertainty regarding future network capacity. To address this, we develop a proactive slice admission control framework for mmWave x-haul networks subject to rain-induced fluctuations. Our objective is to improve network performance, ensure QoS, and optimize revenue, thereby surpassing the limitations of standard reactive approaches. The proposed framework integrates a deep learning predictor of future network conditions with a proactive Q-learning-based slice admission control mechanism. We validate our solution using real-world data from a mmWave x-haul deployment in a dense urban area, incorporating realistic models of link capacity attenuation and dynamic slice demands. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our proactive solution achieves 2-3x higher long-term average revenue under dynamic link conditions, providing a scalable and resilient framework for adaptive admission control.

Towards Generative Ray Path Sampling for Faster Point-to-Point Ray Tracing

Radio propagation modeling is essential in telecommunication research, as radio channels result from complex interactions with environmental objects. Recently, Machine Learning has been attracting attention as a potential alternative to computationally demanding tools, like Ray Tracing, which can model these interactions in detail. However, existing Machine Learning approaches often attempt to learn directly specific channel characteristics, such as the coverage map, making them highly specific to the frequency and material properties and unable to fully capture the underlying propagation mechanisms. Hence, Ray Tracing, particularly the Point-to-Point variant, remains popular to accurately identify all possible paths between transmitter and receiver nodes. Still, path identification is computationally intensive because the number of paths to be tested grows exponentially while only a small fraction is valid. In this paper, we propose a Machine Learning-aided Ray Tracing approach to efficiently sample potential ray paths, significantly reducing the computational load while maintaining high accuracy. Our model dynamically learns to prioritize potentially valid paths among all possible paths and scales linearly with scene complexity. Unlike recent alternatives, our approach is invariant with translation, scaling, or rotation of the geometry, and avoids dependency on specific environment characteristics.