构建多接入流量调度的强化学习仿真环境,验证现有算法局限并提出新优化方法。
NetworkGym: Reinforcement Learning Environments for Multi-Access Traffic Management in Network Simulation
- 设计高保真网络仿真环境NetworkGym,支持多设备多链路流量调度训练与评估。
- 发现主流离线强化学习算法(如CQL)平均表现不如人工启发式策略。
- 提出PTD3算法,通过价值函数悲观性约束提升性能,理论清晰且易实现。
智能手机、笔记本和平板等移动设备通常可同时连接多个接入网络(如Wi-Fi、LTE和5G)。近期进展使得这些连接可在传输层以下实现无缝整合,改善了缺乏多路径支持的应用体验。该优化依赖于为每个设备动态分配各网络间的流量,称为多接入流量分割。本文提出NetworkGym,一个高保真网络环境仿真器,支持生成多条网络流量流及多接入流量分割任务。该仿真器可用于训练和评估基于强化学习的多接入流量分割方案。初步探索表明,大多数现有前沿离线强化学习算法(如CQL)在平均表现上仍不及某些人工设计的启发式策略,凸显了需在更广泛基准下评估离线强化学习算法的紧迫性,而非仅依赖D4RL等流行基准。我们还提出对TD3+BC算法的改进版本——悲观TD3(PTD3),并通过实验证明其优于多种前沿离线强化学习算法。PTD3的行为约束机制基于价值函数悲观性,具有理论支撑且实现简单。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Mobile devices such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets can often connect to multiple access networks (e.g., Wi-Fi, LTE, and 5G) simultaneously. Recent advancements facilitate seamless integration of these connections below the transport layer, enhancing the experience for apps that lack inherent multi-path support. This optimization hinges on dynamically determining the traffic distribution across networks for each device, a process referred to as \textit{multi-access traffic splitting}. This paper introduces \textit{NetworkGym}, a high-fidelity network environment simulator that facilitates generating multiple network traffic flows and multi-access traffic splitting. This simulator facilitates training and evaluating different RL-based solutions for the multi-access traffic splitting problem. Our initial explorations demonstrate that the majority of existing state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms (e.g. CQL) fail to outperform certain hand-crafted heuristic policies on average. This illustrates the urgent need to evaluate offline RL algorithms against a broader range of benchmarks, rather than relying solely on popular ones such as D4RL. We also propose an extension to the TD3+BC algorithm, named Pessimistic TD3 (PTD3), and demonstrate that it outperforms many state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms. PTD3's behavioral constraint mechanism, which relies on value-function pessimism, is theoretically motivated and relatively simple to implement.
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