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Article
QMIX Aided Routing in Social-Based Delay-Tolerant Networks
IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
  • Chenchen Han, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
  • Haipeng Yao, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
  • Tianle Mai, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
  • Ni Zhang, The 6th Research Institute of China Electronics Corporation
  • Mohsen Guizani, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
Document Type
Article
Abstract

Delay-tolerant network (DTN) is a network that's designed to operate effectively in heterogeneous networks that may lack continuous network connectivity. It is characterized by their lack of instantaneous end-to-end paths, resulting in difficulties in designing effective DTN routing protocols. Traditional routing algorithms largely rely on greedy schemes. Such schemes can not guarantee the packets will be eventually transmitted to their destinations, thereby presenting a poor transmission efficiency. Recently, the social-based method has attracted a large amount of attention in wireless network routing. It can use the community and the centrality information to increase the delivery rate of the whole network. Therefore, in this article, we introduce the social-based mechanism to our DTN routing design. Besides, how the distributed nodes can learn the collaboration strategies is another challenge. Inspired by the recent success of multi-agent learning in online control, we adopt a centralized training and distributed execution learning paradigm and design a hierarchical social-based DTN architecture. Based on this, we propose a collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (termed as QMIX) aided routing algorithm.

DOI
10.1109/TVT.2021.3133449
Publication Date
2-1-2022
Keywords
  • Dec-POMDP,
  • delay-tolerant networks,
  • QMIX,
  • routing protocol,
  • social attributes
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Citation Information
C. Han, H. Yao, T. Mai, N. Zhang, and M. Guizani, "QMIX aided routing in social-based delay-tolerant networks," in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, vol. 71, no. 2, pp. 1952-1963, Feb. 2022, doi: 10.1109/TVT.2021.3133449.