학술논문

Improved Quality of Online Education Using Prioritized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Video Traffic Scheduling
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting IEEE Trans. on Broadcast. Broadcasting, IEEE Transactions on. 69(2):436-454 Jun, 2023
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Quality of experience
Quality of service
Streaming media
Pandemics
Education
Resource management
Reinforcement learning
Machine learning
multi-agent reinforcement learning
video traffic prioritization
QoE
online education
Language
ISSN
0018-9316
1557-9611
Abstract
The recent global pandemic has transformed the way education is delivered, increasing the importance of video-based online learning. However, this puts a significant pressure on the underlying communication networks and the limited available bandwidth needs to be intelligently allocated to support a much higher transmission load, including video-based services. In this context, this paper proposes a Machine Learning (ML)-based solution that dynamically prioritizes content viewers with heterogeneous video services to increase their Quality of Service (QoS) and perceived Quality of Experience (QoE). The proposed approach makes use of the novel Prioritized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning solution (PriMARL) to decide the prioritization order of the video-based services based on networking conditions. However, the performance in terms of QoS and QoE provisioning to learners with different profiles and networking conditions depends on the type of scheduler employed in the frequency domain to conduct the scheduling and the radio resource allocation. To decide the best approach to be followed, we employ the proposed PriMARL solution with different types of scheduling rules and compare them with other state-of-the-art solutions in terms of throughput, delay, packet loss, Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for different traffic loads and characteristics. We show that the proposed solution achieves the best user QoE results.