Structured Reinforcement Learning for Media Streaming at the Wireless Edge

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Bura, Archana, Bobbili, Sarat Chandra, Rameshkumar, Shreyas, Rengarajan, Desik, Kalathil, Dileep, Shakkottai, Srinivas
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Bura, Archana
Bobbili, Sarat Chandra
Rameshkumar, Shreyas
Rengarajan, Desik
Kalathil, Dileep
Shakkottai, Srinivas
author_facet Bura, Archana
Bobbili, Sarat Chandra
Rameshkumar, Shreyas
Rengarajan, Desik
Kalathil, Dileep
Shakkottai, Srinivas
contents Media streaming is the dominant application over wireless edge (access) networks. The increasing softwarization of such networks has led to efforts at intelligent control, wherein application-specific actions may be dynamically taken to enhance the user experience. The goal of this work is to develop and demonstrate learning-based policies for optimal decision making to determine which clients to dynamically prioritize in a video streaming setting. We formulate the policy design question as a constrained Markov decision problem (CMDP), and observe that by using a Lagrangian relaxation we can decompose it into single-client problems. Further, the optimal policy takes a threshold form in the video buffer length, which enables us to design an efficient constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) algorithm to learn it. Specifically, we show that a natural policy gradient (NPG) based algorithm that is derived using the structure of our problem converges to the globally optimal policy. We then develop a simulation environment for training, and a real-world intelligent controller attached to a WiFi access point for evaluation. We empirically show that the structured learning approach enables fast learning. Furthermore, such a structured policy can be easily deployed due to low computational complexity, leading to policy execution taking only about 15$μ$s. Using YouTube streaming experiments in a resource constrained scenario, we demonstrate that the CRL approach can increase quality of experience (QOE) by over 30\%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_07315
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Structured Reinforcement Learning for Media Streaming at the Wireless Edge
Bura, Archana
Bobbili, Sarat Chandra
Rameshkumar, Shreyas
Rengarajan, Desik
Kalathil, Dileep
Shakkottai, Srinivas
Systems and Control
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Media streaming is the dominant application over wireless edge (access) networks. The increasing softwarization of such networks has led to efforts at intelligent control, wherein application-specific actions may be dynamically taken to enhance the user experience. The goal of this work is to develop and demonstrate learning-based policies for optimal decision making to determine which clients to dynamically prioritize in a video streaming setting. We formulate the policy design question as a constrained Markov decision problem (CMDP), and observe that by using a Lagrangian relaxation we can decompose it into single-client problems. Further, the optimal policy takes a threshold form in the video buffer length, which enables us to design an efficient constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) algorithm to learn it. Specifically, we show that a natural policy gradient (NPG) based algorithm that is derived using the structure of our problem converges to the globally optimal policy. We then develop a simulation environment for training, and a real-world intelligent controller attached to a WiFi access point for evaluation. We empirically show that the structured learning approach enables fast learning. Furthermore, such a structured policy can be easily deployed due to low computational complexity, leading to policy execution taking only about 15$μ$s. Using YouTube streaming experiments in a resource constrained scenario, we demonstrate that the CRL approach can increase quality of experience (QOE) by over 30\%.
title Structured Reinforcement Learning for Media Streaming at the Wireless Edge
topic Systems and Control
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.07315