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 by using a Lagrangian relaxation we decompose it into single-client problems. Further, the optimal policy takes a threshold form in the video buffer length. We then derive a natural policy gradient (NPG) based constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) algorithm using the structure of our problem, and show that it 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 demonstrate using youtube media streaming experiments that our policy can increase the user quality of experience by over 30%. Furthermore, we show that the structured learning is fast, and can be easily deployed, taking only about 15μs to execute.

This work presents Windex, a novel light weight whittle index network-driven realtime scheduler for scalable service guarantees in NextG cellular networks. Windex addresses the resource allocation challenge in NextG cellular radio access networks (RAN), where resources must be shared among diverse user applications, each requiring guarantees on throughput and service regularity, taking into account service guarantees, channel quality, and system load. Implemented in a real time intelligent controller (RIC), and evaluating across standardized 3GPP service classes, we demonstrate the least service violations compared to state-of-the-art systems using over-the-air channel traces on a 5G testbed.

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 by using a Lagrangian relaxation we decompose it into single-client problems. Further, the optimal policy takes a threshold form in the video buffer length. We then derive a natural policy gradient (NPG) based constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) algorithm using the structure of our problem, and show that it 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 demonstrate using youtube media streaming experiments that our policy can increase the user quality of experience by over 30%. Furthermore, we show that the structured learning is fast, and can be easily deployed, taking only about 15μs to execute.

Safe reinforcement learning is extremely challenging--not only must the agent explore an unknown environment, it must do so while ensuring no safety constraint violations. We formulate this safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem using the framework of a finite-horizon Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) with an unknown transition probability function, where we model the safety requirements as constraints on the expected cumulative costs that must be satisfied during all episodes of learning. We propose a model-based safe RL algorithm that we call Doubly Optimistic and Pessimistic Exploration (DOPE), and show that it achieves an objective regret $\tilde{O}(|\mathcal{S}|\sqrt{|\mathcal{A}| K})$ without violating the safety constraints during learning, where $|\mathcal{S}|$ is the number of states, $|\mathcal{A}|$ is the number of actions, and $K$ is the number of learning episodes. Our key idea is to combine a reward bonus for exploration (optimism) with a conservative constraint (pessimism), in addition to the standard optimistic model-based exploration. DOPE is not only able to improve the objective regret bound, but also shows a significant empirical performance improvement as compared to earlier optimism-pessimism approaches.

The predominant use of wireless access networks is for media streaming applications. However, current access networks treat all packets identically, and lack the agility to determine which clients are most in need of service at a given time. Software reconfigurability of networking devices has seen wide adoption, and this in turn implies that agile control policies can be now instantiated on access networks. Exploiting such reconfigurability requires the design of a system that can enable a configuration, measure the impact on the application performance (Quality of Experience), and adaptively select a new configuration. Effectively, this feedback loop is a Markov Decision Process whose parameters are unknown. The goal of this work is to develop QFlow, a platform that instantiates this feedback loop, and instantiate a variety of control policies over it. We use the popular application of video streaming over YouTube as our use case. Our context is priority queueing, with the action space being that of determining which clients should be assigned to each queue at each decision period. We first develop policies based on model-based and model-free reinforcement learning. We then design an auction-based system under which clients place bids for priority service, as well as a more structured index-based policy. Through experiments, we show how these learning-based policies on QFlow are able to select the right clients for prioritization in a high-load scenario to outperform the best known solutions with over 25% improvement in QoE, and a perfect QoE score of 5 over 85% of the time.

Crucial performance metrics of a caching algorithm include its ability to quickly and accurately learn a popularity distribution of requests. However, a majority of work on analytical performance analysis focuses on hit probability after an asymptotically large time has elapsed. We consider an online learning viewpoint, and characterize the “regret” in terms of the finite time difference between the hits achieved by a candidate caching algorithm with respect to a genie-aided scheme that places the most popular items in the cache. We first consider the Full Observation regime wherein all requests are seen by the cache. We show that the Least Frequently Used (LFU) algorithm is able to achieve order optimal regret, which is matched by an efficient counting algorithm design that we call LFU-Lite. We then consider the Partial Observation regime wherein only requests for items currently cached are seen by the cache, making it similar to an online learning problem related to the multi-armed bandit problem. We show how approaching this “caching bandit” using traditional approaches yields either high complexity or regret, but a simple algorithm design that exploits the structure of the distribution can ensure order optimal regret. We conclude by illustrating our insights using numerical simulations.

Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the policy employed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. The analytical formulation usually takes the form of a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). We focus on the case where the CMDP is unknown, and RL algorithms obtain samples to discover the model and compute an optimal constrained policy. Our goal is to characterize the relationship between safety constraints and the number of samples needed to ensure a desired level of accuracy---both objective maximization and constraint satisfaction---in a PAC sense. We explore two classes of RL algorithms, namely, (i) a generative model based approach, wherein samples are taken initially to estimate a model, and (ii) an online approach, wherein the model is updated as samples are obtained. Our main finding is that compared to the best known bounds of the unconstrained regime, the sample complexity of constrained RL algorithms are increased by a factor that is logarithmic in the number of constraints, which suggests that the approach may be easily utilized in real systems.

Wireless Internet access has brought legions of heterogeneous applications all sharing the same resources. However, current wireless edge networks that cater to worst or average case performance lack the agility to best serve these diverse sessions. Simultaneously, software reconfigurable infrastructure has become increasingly mainstream to the point that dynamic per packet and per flow decisions are possible at multiple layers of the communications stack. Exploiting such reconfigurability requires the design of a system that can enable a configuration, measure the impact on the application performance (Quality of Experience), and adaptively select a new configuration. Effectively, this feedback loop is a Markov Decision Process whose parameters are unknown. The goal of this work is to design, develop and demonstrate QFlow that instantiates this feedback loop as an application of reinforcement learning (RL). Our context is that of reconfigurable (priority) queueing, and we use the popular application of video streaming as our use case. We develop both model-free and model-based RL approaches that are tailored to the problem of determining which clients should be assigned to which queue at each decision period. Through experimental validation, we show how the RL-based control policies on QFlow are able to schedule the right clients for prioritization in a high-load scenario to outperform the status quo, as well as the best known solutions with over 25% improvement in QoE, and a perfect QoE score of 5 over 85% of the time.

Modern communication and computation systems consist of large networks of unreliable nodes. Yet, it is well known that such systems can provide aggregate reliability via information redundancy, duplicating paths, or replicating computations. While redundancy may increase the load on a system, it can also lead to major performance improvements through the judicious management of additional system resources. Two important examples of this abstract paradigm are content access from multiple caches in content delivery networks and master/slave computations on compute clusters. Many recent articles in the area have proposed bounds on the latency performance of redundant systems, characterizing the latency-redundancy tradeoff under specific load profiles. Following a similar line of research, this article introduces new analytical bounds and approximation techniques for the latency-redundancy tradeoff for a range of system loads and two popular redundancy schemes. The proposed framework allows for approximating the equilibrium latency distribution, from which various metrics can be derived including mean, variance, and the tail decay of stationary distributions.

We study TCP performance over ON-OFF channels, i.e., channels which are busy/unavailable for transmissions intermittently. The data may also be subject to random errors. Such situations arise in cognitive radio networks when secondary users opportunistically use the channel when the licensed user is not using it. We use a Markov model to evaluate the TCP throughput and probability of retransmission timeout when the ON-OFF periods are exponentially distributed and then extend it to phase-type ON and phase-type OFF periods. We then generalize the Markovian model to more general ON-OFF duration distributions and also to multiple TCP connections.