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Article
Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning Aided Service Function Chain Deployment for Internet of Things
IEEE Internet of Things Journal
  • Yuchao Zhu, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
  • Haipeng Yao, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
  • Tianle Mai, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
  • Wenji He, 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

Nowadays, the compelling applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) bring unexpected economic benefits to our daily life. But at the same time, it also poses huge challenges to service providers. Diverse proprietary hardwares (i.e., firewall, code conversion) have to be deployed in networks for meeting different applications’ requirements. Recently, network functions virtualization (NFV) is considered a promising technique. In the NFV-enabled architecture, network services can be implemented via a set of orderly virtual network functions (VNFs) on standardized compute nodes, which is termed service function chains (SFCs). However, with the explosion of IoT applications, embedding multiple SFCs in a shared NFV-enabled infrastructure becomes a challenging problem. Centralized schemes suffer from the scalability and private issue, while distributed schemes suffer the non-convergence problem. In this paper, we propose a hybrid intelligent control architecture, which adopts the centralized training and distributed execution paradigm. A centralized critic is introduced to ease the training process of the distributed network nodes. Besides, considering the competitive behavior of users, we formulate the resource allocation problem as a multi-user competition game model. Based on this, we proposed a multi-agent reinforcement learning-based SFCs deployment algorithm.

DOI
10.1109/JIOT.2022.3151134
Publication Date
1-1-2022
Keywords
  • Costs,
  • Games,
  • Hardware,
  • Internet of Things,
  • Internet of Things,
  • Multi-agent System,
  • Network Function Virtualization,
  • Privacy,
  • Reinforcement Learning,
  • Scalability,
  • Servers,
  • Service Function Chain.
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Citation Information
Y. Zhu, H. Yao, T. Mai, W. He, N. Zhang and M. Guizani, "Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning Aided Service Function Chain Deployment for Internet of Things," in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, Feb 2022, doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2022.3151134.