This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on applications of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in communications and networking. Modern networks, e.g., Internet of Things (IoT) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, become more decentralized and autonomous. In such networks, network entities need to make decisions locally to maximize the network performance under uncertainty of network environment. Reinforcement learning has been efficiently used to enable the network entities to obtain the optimal policy including, e.g., decisions or actions, given their states when the state and action spaces are small. However, in complex and large-scale networks, the state and action spaces are usually large, and the reinforcement learning may not be able to find the optimal policy in reasonable time. Therefore, DRL, a combination of reinforcement learning with deep learning, has been developed to overcome the shortcomings. In this survey, we first give a tutorial of DRL from fundamental concepts to advanced models. Then, we review DRL approaches proposed to address emerging issues in communications and networking. The issues include dynamic network access, data rate control, wireless caching, data offloading, network security, and connectivity preservation which are all important to next generation networks, such as 5G and beyond. Furthermore, we present applications of DRL for traffic routing, resource sharing, and data collection. Finally, we highlight important challenges, open issues, and future research directions of applying DRL.

Applications of Deep Reinforcement Learning in Communications and Networking: A Survey

Due to the recent progress in Deep Neural Networks, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become one of the most important and useful technology. It is a learning method where a software agent interacts with an unknown environment, selects actions, and progressively discovers the environment dynamics. RL has been effectively applied in many important areas of real life. This article intends to provide an in-depth introduction of the Markov Decision Process, RL and its algorithms. Moreover, we present a literature review of the application of RL to a variety of fields, including robotics and autonomous control, communication and networking, natural language processing, games and self-organized system, scheduling management and configuration of resources, and computer vision.

/pdf/a-gentle-introduction-to-reinforcement-learning-and-its-4azgyiqgmk.pdf

A Gentle Introduction to Reinforcement Learning and its Application in Different Fields

Microservice, an architectural design that decomposes applications into loosely coupled services, is adopted in modern software design, including cloud-based scientific workflow processing. The microservice design makes scientific workflow systems more modular, more flexible, and easier to develop. However, cloud deployment of microservice workflow execution systems doesn't come for free, and proper resource management decisions have to be made in order to achieve certain performance objective (e.g., response time) within constraint operation cost. Nevertheless, effective online resource allocation decisions are hard to achieve due to dynamic workloads and the complicated interactions of microservices in each workflow. In this paper, we propose an adaptive resource allocation approach for microservice workflow system based on recent advances in reinforcement learning. Our approach (1) assumes little prior knowledge of the microservice workflow system and does not require any elaborately designed model or crafted representative simulator of the underlying system, and (2) avoids high sample complexity which is a common drawback of model-free reinforcement learning when applied to real-world scenarios. We show that our proposed approach automatically achieves effective policy for resource allocation with limited number of time-consuming interactions with the microservice workflow system. We perform extensive evaluations to validate the effectiveness of our approach and demonstrate that it outperforms existing resource allocation approaches with read-world emulated workflows.

MIRAS: Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Microservice Resource Allocation over Scientific Workflows

Big data frameworks such as Spark and Hadoop are widely adopted to run analytics jobs in both research and industry. Cloud offers affordable compute resources which are easier to manage. Hence, many organizations are shifting towards a cloud deployment of their big data computing clusters. However, job scheduling is a complex problem in the presence of various Service Level Agreement (SLA) objectives such as monetary cost reduction, and job performance improvement. Most of the existing research does not address multiple objectives together and fail to capture the inherent cluster and workload characteristics. In this article, we formulate the job scheduling problem of a cloud-deployed Spark cluster and propose a novel Reinforcement Learning (RL) model to accommodate the SLA objectives. We develop the RL cluster environment and implement two Deep Reinforce Learning (DRL) based schedulers in TF-Agents framework. The proposed DRL-based scheduling agents work at a fine-grained level to place the executors of jobs while leveraging the pricing model of cloud VM instances. In addition, the DRL-based agents can also learn the inherent characteristics of different types of jobs to find a proper placement to reduce both the total cluster VM usage cost and the average job duration. The results show that the proposed DRL-based algorithms can reduce the VM usage cost up to 30%. 

Performance and Cost-Efficient Spark Job Scheduling Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning in Cloud Computing Environments

This paper aims to predict the apps a user will open on her mobile device next. Such an information is essential for many smartphone operations, e.g., app pre-loading and content pre-caching, to save mobile energy. However, it is hard to build an explicit model that accurately depicts the affecting factors and their affecting mechanism of time-varying app usage behavior. This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning framework, named as DeepAPP, which learns a model-free predictive neural network from historical app usage data. Meanwhile, an online updating strategy is designed to adapt the predictive network to the time-varying app usage behavior. To transform DeepAPP into a practical deep reinforcement learning system, several challenges are addressed by developing a context representation method for complex contextual environment, a general agent for overcoming data sparsity and a lightweight personalized agent for minimizing the prediction time. Extensive experiments on a large-scale anonymized app usage dataset reveal that DeepAPP provides high accuracy (precision 70.6% and recall of 62.4%) and reduces the prediction time of the state-of-the-art by 6.58×. A field experiment of 29 participants also demonstrates DeepAPP can effectively reduce time of loading apps.

DeepAPP: a deep reinforcement learning framework for mobile application usage prediction

In this paper, we focus on general-purpose Distributed Stream Data Processing Systems (DSDPSs), which deal with processing of unbounded streams of continuous data at scale distributedly in real or ...

Model-free control for distributed stream data processing using deep reinforcement learning

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

LiTeng

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

Model-free control for distributed stream data processing using deep reinforcement learning