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An important aspect of 5G networks is the development of Radio Access Network (RAN) slicing, a concept wherein the virtualized infrastructure of wireless networks is subdivided into slices (or enterprises), tailored to fulfill specific use-cases. A key focus in this context is the efficient radio resource allocation to meet various enterprises' service-level agreements (SLAs). In this work, we introduce Helix: a channel-aware and SLA-aware RAN slicing framework for massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) networks where resource allocation extends to incorporate the spatial dimension available through beamforming. Essentially, the same time-frequency resource block (RB) can be shared across multiple users through multiple antennas. Notably, certain enterprises, particularly those operating critical infrastructure, necessitate dedicated RB allocation, denoted as private networks, to ensure security. Conversely, some enterprises would allow resource sharing with others in the public network to maintain network performance while minimizing capital expenditure. Building upon this understanding, Helix comprises scheduling schemes under both scenarios: where different slices share the same set of RBs, and where they require exclusivity of allocated RBs. We validate the efficacy of our proposed schedulers through simulation by utilizing a channel data set collected from a real-world massive MIMO testbed. Our assessments demonstrate that resource sharing across slices using our approach can lead up to 60.9% reduction in RB usage compared to other approaches. Moreover, our proposed schedulers exhibit significantly enhanced operational efficiency, with significantly faster running time compared to exhaustive greedy approaches while meeting the stringent 5G sub-millisecond-level latency requirement. 

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is an approach wherein the experience gained from solving a variety of tasks is distilled into a meta-policy. The metapolicy, when adapted over only a small (or just a single) number of steps, is able to perform near-optimally on a new, related task. However, a major challenge to adopting this approach to solve real-world problems is that they are often associated with sparse reward functions that only indicate whether a task is completed partially or fully. We consider the situation where some data, possibly generated by a suboptimal agent, is available for each task. We then develop a class of algorithms entitled Enhanced Meta-RL using Demonstrations (EMRLD) that exploit this information—even if sub-optimal—to obtain guidance during training. We show how EMRLD jointly utilizes RL and supervised learning over the offline data to generate a meta-policy that demonstrates monotone performance improvements. We also develop a warm started variant called EMRLD-WS that is particularly efficient for sub-optimal demonstration data. Finally, we show that our EMRLD algorithms significantly outperform existing approaches in a variety of sparse reward environments, including that of a mobile robot.