Title
SmartCC: A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Multipath TCP Congestion Control in Heterogeneous Networks
Abstract
The Multipath TCP (MPTCP) protocol has been standardized by the IETF as an extension of conventional TCP, which enables multi-homed devices to establish multiple paths for simultaneous data transmission. Congestion control is a fundamental mechanism for the design and implementation of MPTCP. Due to the diverse QoS characteristics of heterogeneous links, existing multipath congestion control mechanisms suffer from a number of performance problems such as bufferbloat, suboptimal bandwidth usage, etc. In this paper, we propose a learning-based multipath congestion control approach called <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">SmartCC</italic> to deal with the diversities of multiple communication path in heterogeneous networks. SmartCC adopts an asynchronous reinforcement learning framework to learn a set of congestion rules, which allows the sender to observe the environment and take actions to adjust the subflows’ congestion windows adaptively to fit different network situations. To deal with the problem of infinite states in high-dimensional space, we propose a hierarchical tile coding algorithm for state aggregation and a function estimation approach for <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -learning, which can derive the optimal policy efficiently. Due to the asynchronous design of SmartCC, the processes of model training and execution are decoupled, and the learning process will not introduce extra delay and overhead on the decision making process in MPTCP congestion control. We conduct extensive experiments for performance evaluation, which show that SmartCC improves the aggregate throughput significantly and outperforms the state-of-the-art mechanisms on a variety of performance metrics.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/JSAC.2019.2933761
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Keywords
Field
DocType
Reinforcement learning,Heterogeneous networks,Adaptation models,Aerospace electronics,Training,Packet loss
Asynchronous communication,Bufferbloat,Computer science,Multipath TCP,Packet loss,Computer network,Quality of service,Network congestion,Heterogeneous network,Reinforcement learning
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
37
11
0733-8716
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.55
0
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wenzhong Li167655.27
Han Zhang212328.55
Shaohua Gao390.91
Chaojing Xue4111.60
Xiaoliang Wang5195.46
Sanglu Lu61380144.07