EExApp: GNN-Based Reinforcement Learning for Radio Unit Energy Optimization in 5G O-RAN

With over 3.5 million 5G base stations deployed globally, their collective energy consumption (projected to exceed 131 TWh annually) raises significant concerns over both operational costs and environmental impacts. In this paper, we present EExAPP, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based xApp for 5G Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) that jointly optimizes radio unit (RU) sleep scheduling and distributed unit (DU) resource slicing. EExAPP uses a dual-actor-dual-critic Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) architecture, with dedicated actor-critic pairs targeting energy efficiency and quality-of-service (QoS) compliance. A transformer-based encoder enables scalable handling of variable user equipment (UE) populations by encoding all-UE observations into fixed-dimensional representations. To coordinate the two optimization objectives, a bipartite Graph Attention Network (GAT) is used to modulate actor updates based on both critic outputs, enabling adaptive tradeoffs between power savings and QoS. We have implemented EExAPP and deployed it on a real-world 5G O-RAN testbed with live traffic, commercial RU and smartphones. Extensive over-the-air experiments and ablation studies confirm that EExAPP significantly outperforms existing methods in reducing the energy consumption of RU while maintaining QoS.

Near-Real-Time Resource Slicing for QoS Optimization in 5G O-RAN using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Open-Radio Access Network (O-RAN) has become an important paradigm for 5G and beyond radio access networks. This paper presents an xApp called xSlice for the Near-Real-Time (Near-RT) RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) of 5G O-RANs. xSlice is an online learning algorithm that adaptively adjusts MAC-layer resource allocation in response to dynamic network states, including time-varying wireless channel conditions, user mobility, traffic fluctuations, and changes in user demand. To address these network dynamics, we first formulate the Quality-of-Service (QoS) optimization problem as a regret minimization problem by quantifying the QoS demands of all traffic sessions through weighting their throughput, latency, and reliability. We then develop a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework that utilizes an actor-critic model to combine the advantages of both value-based and policy-based updating methods. A graph convolutional network (GCN) is incorporated as a component of the DRL framework for graph embedding of RAN data, enabling xSlice to handle a dynamic number of traffic sessions. We have implemented xSlice on an O-RAN testbed with 10 smartphones and conducted extensive experiments to evaluate its performance in realistic scenarios. Experimental results show that xSlice can reduce performance regret by 67% compared to the state-of-the-art solutions. Source code is available on GitHub [1].