Offline and Distributional Reinforcement Learning for Wireless Communications

The rapid growth of heterogeneous and massive wireless connectivity in 6G networks demands intelligent solutions to ensure scalability, reliability, privacy, ultra-low latency, and effective control. Although artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have demonstrated their potential in this domain, traditional online reinforcement learning (RL) and deep RL methods face limitations in real-time wireless networks. For instance, these methods rely on online interaction with the environment, which might be unfeasible, costly, or unsafe. In addition, they cannot handle the inherent uncertainties in real-time wireless applications. We focus on offline and distributional RL, two advanced RL techniques that can overcome these challenges by training on static datasets and accounting for network uncertainties. We introduce a novel framework that combines offline and distributional RL for wireless communication applications. Through case studies on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) trajectory optimization and radio resource management (RRM), we demonstrate that our proposed conservative quantile regression (CQR) algorithm outperforms conventional RL approaches regarding convergence speed and risk management. Finally, we discuss open challenges and potential future directions for applying these techniques in 6G networks, paving the way for safer and more efficient real-time wireless systems.