학술논문

Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Dimensioning of Cloud Caches: A Restless Bandit Approach
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking Networking, IEEE/ACM Transactions on. 31(5):2147-2161 Oct, 2023
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Signal Processing and Analysis
Indexes
Costs
Cloud computing
Reinforcement learning
Heuristic algorithms
Computational modeling
IEEE transactions
Cloud cache dimensioning
index policy
restless bandits
reinforcement learning
Language
ISSN
1063-6692
1558-2566
Abstract
We study the dynamic cache dimensioning problem, where the objective is to decide how much storage to place in the cache to minimize the total costs with respect to the storage and content delivery latency. We formulate this problem as a Markov decision process, which turns out to be a restless multi-armed bandit problem and is provably hard to solve. For given dimensioning decisions, it is possible to develop solutions based on the celebrated Whittle index policy. However, Whittle index policy has not been studied for dynamic cache dimensioning, mainly because cache dimensioning needs to be repeatedly solved and jointly optimized with content caching. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a low-complexity fluid Whittle index policy, which jointly determines dimensioning and content caching. We show that this policy is asymptotically optimal. We further develop a lightweight reinforcement learning augmented algorithm dubbed fW-UCB when the content request and delivery rates are unavailable. fW-UCB is shown to achieve a sub-linear regret as it fully exploits the structure of the near-optimal fluid Whittle index policy and hence can be easily implemented. Extensive simulations using real traces support our theoretical results.