Title
Feature Engineering for Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Routing
Abstract
Recent advances in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) techniques are providing a dramatic improvement in decision-making and automated control problems. As a result, we are witnessing a growing number of research works that are proposing ways of applying DRL techniques to network- related problems such as routing. However, such proposals failed to achieve good results, often under-performing traditional routing techniques. We argue that successfully applying DRL-based techniques to networking requires finding good representations of the network parameters: feature engineering. DRL agents need to represent both the state (e.g., link utilization) and the action space (e.g., changes to the routing policy). In this paper, we show that existing approaches use straightforward representations that lead to poor performance. We propose a novel representation of the state and action that outperforms existing ones and that is flexible enough to be applied to many networking use-cases. We test our representation in two different scenarios: (i) routing in optical transport networks and (ii) QoS-aware routing in IP networks. Our results show that the DRL agent achieves significantly better performance compared to existing state/action representations.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/ICC.2019.8761276
IEEE International Conference on Communications
Field
DocType
ISSN
Computer science,Computer network,Feature engineering,Artificial intelligence,Reinforcement learning,Automated control
Conference
1550-3607
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
José Suárez-Varela194.33
Albert Mestres2676.80
Junlin Yu300.34
li kuang4323.85
Haoyu Feng500.34
Pere Barlet-ros626927.74
Albert Cabellos-Aparicio741846.33