학술논문

EdAR: An Experience-Driven Multipath Scheduler for Seamless Handoff in Mobile Networks
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun. Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on. 22(10):6839-6852 Oct, 2023
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Signal Processing and Analysis
TCPIP
Multipath channels
Bandwidth
Degradation
Scheduling algorithms
Scheduling
Packet loss
MPTCP
scheduler
handoff
experience-driven
deep reinforcement learning
Language
ISSN
1536-1276
1558-2248
Abstract
Multipath TCP (MPTCP) improves the bandwidth utilization in wireless network scenarios, since it can simultaneously utilize multiple interfaces for data transmission. However, with the fast growth of mobile devices and applications, link interruptions caused by handoffs still lead to drastic performance degradation in such scenarios. Typically, a series of packet losses on part of the links will block the transmission of the entire connection when handoff occurs. This paper proposes an Experience-driven Adaptive Redundant packet scheduler (EdAR) for MPTCP, aiming at achieving seamless handoffs in mobile networks. EdAR enables flexibly scheduling redundant packets with an experience-driven learning-based approach in the face of drastic network environment changes for multipath performance enhancement. To enable accurate learning and prediction, both the network environment and the best course of actions are jointly learned via a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agent, which we design with a hybrid structure to deal with the complexity of system states. Furthermore, both offline and online learning are utilized to allow the agent to adapt to different and changing network environments. Evaluation results show that EdAR outperforms the state-of-the-art MPTCP schedulers in most network scenarios. Specifically in mobile networks with frequent handoffs, EdAR brings $2\times $ improvement in terms of the overall goodput.