2021/10/20 by Andrea Ortiz, Ortiz, Andrea, Daniel Barragán-Yani +1
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT) #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2110.10549
openalex publication_date 2021/10/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The ever-increasing number of nodes in current and future wireless communication networks brings unprecedented challenges for the allocation of the available communication resources. This is caused by the combinatorial nature of the resource allocation problems, which limits the performance of state-of-the-art techniques when the network size increases. In this paper, we take a new direction and investigate how methods from statistical physics can be used to address resource allocation problems in large networks. To this aim, we propose a novel model of the wireless network based on a type of disordered physical systems called spin glasses. We show that resource allocation problems have the same structure as the problem of finding specific configurations in spin glasses. Based on this parallel, we investigate the use of the Survey Propagation method from statistical physics in the solution of resource allocation problems in wireless networks. Through numerical simulations we show that the proposed statistical-physics-based resource allocation algorithm is a promising tool for the efficient allocation of communication resources in large wireless communications networks. Given a fixed number of resources, we are able to serve a larger number of nodes, compared to state-of-the-art reference schemes, without introducing more interference into the system