Learning and Reconstructing Conflicts in O-RAN: A Graph Neural Network Approach

Abstract: The Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architecture enables the deployment of third-party applications on the RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs). However, the operation of third-party applications in the Near Real-Time RIC (Near-RT RIC), known as xApps, may result in conflicting interactions. Each xApp can independently modify the same control parameters to achieve distinct outcomes, which has the potential to cause performance degradation and network instability. The current conflict detection and mitigation solutions in the literature assume that all conflicts are known a priori, which does not always hold due to complex and often hidden relationships between control parameters and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). In this paper, we introduce the first data-driven method for reconstructing and labeling conflict graphs in O-RAN. Specifically, we leverage GraphSAGE, an inductive learning framework, to dynamically learn the hidden relationships between xApps, parameters, and KPIs. Our numerical results, based on a conflict model used in the O-RAN conflict management literature, demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively reconstruct conflict graphs and identify the conflicts defined by the O-RAN Alliance.