An Overlay Multicast Routing Method Based on Network Situational Awareness and Hierarchical Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ye, Miao, Chen, Yanye, Wang, Yong, Zhu, Cheng, Jiang, Qiuxiang, Huang, Gai, Ding, Feng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866910158183989248
author Ye, Miao
Chen, Yanye
Wang, Yong
Zhu, Cheng
Jiang, Qiuxiang
Huang, Gai
Ding, Feng
author_facet Ye, Miao
Chen, Yanye
Wang, Yong
Zhu, Cheng
Jiang, Qiuxiang
Huang, Gai
Ding, Feng
contents Compared with IP multicast, Overlay Multicast (OM) offers better compatibility and flexible deployment in heterogeneous, cross-domain networks. However, traditional OM struggles to adapt to dynamic traffic due to unawareness of physical resource states, and existing reinforcement learning methods fail to decouple OM's tightly coupled multi-objective nature, leading to high complexity, slow convergence, and instability. To address this, we propose MA-DHRL-OM, a multi-agent deep hierarchical reinforcement learning approach. Using SDN's global view, it builds a traffic-aware model for OM path planning. The method decomposes OM tree construction into two stages via hierarchical agents, reducing action space and improving convergence stability. Multi-agent collaboration balances multi-objective optimization while enhancing scalability and adaptability. Experiments show MA-DHRL-OM outperforms existing methods in delay, bandwidth utilization, and packet loss, with more stable convergence and flexible routing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_13211
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Overlay Multicast Routing Method Based on Network Situational Awareness and Hierarchical Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Ye, Miao
Chen, Yanye
Wang, Yong
Zhu, Cheng
Jiang, Qiuxiang
Huang, Gai
Ding, Feng
Networking and Internet Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Compared with IP multicast, Overlay Multicast (OM) offers better compatibility and flexible deployment in heterogeneous, cross-domain networks. However, traditional OM struggles to adapt to dynamic traffic due to unawareness of physical resource states, and existing reinforcement learning methods fail to decouple OM's tightly coupled multi-objective nature, leading to high complexity, slow convergence, and instability. To address this, we propose MA-DHRL-OM, a multi-agent deep hierarchical reinforcement learning approach. Using SDN's global view, it builds a traffic-aware model for OM path planning. The method decomposes OM tree construction into two stages via hierarchical agents, reducing action space and improving convergence stability. Multi-agent collaboration balances multi-objective optimization while enhancing scalability and adaptability. Experiments show MA-DHRL-OM outperforms existing methods in delay, bandwidth utilization, and packet loss, with more stable convergence and flexible routing.
title An Overlay Multicast Routing Method Based on Network Situational Awareness and Hierarchical Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13211