Wireless Optimisation via Convex Bandits: Unlicensed LTE/WiFi Coexistence

Bandit Convex Optimisation (BCO) is a powerful framework for sequential decision-making in non-stationary and partially observable environments. In a BCO problem, a decision-maker sequentially picks actions to minimize the cumulative cost associated with these decisions, all while receiving partial feedback about the state of the environment. This formulation is a very natural fit for wireless-network optimisation problems and has great application potential since: i) instead of assuming full observability of the network state, it only requires the metric to optimise as input, and ii) it provides strong performance guarantees while making only minimal assumptions about the network dynamics. Despite these advantages, BCO has not yet been explored in the context of wireless-network optimisation. In this paper, we make the first steps to demonstrate the potential of BCO techniques by formulating an unlicensed LTE/WiFi fair coexistence use case in the framework, and providing empirical results in a simulated environment. On the algorithmic front, we propose a simple and natural sequential multi-point BCO algorithm amenable to wireless networking optimisation, and provide its theoretical analysis. We expect the contributions of this paper to pave the way to further research on the application of online convex methods in the bandit setting.