Reinforcement learning in network control

With the rapid growth of information technology, network systems have become increasingly complex. In particular, designing network control policies requires knowledge of underlying network dynamics, which are often unknown, and need to be learned. Existing reinforcement learning methods such as Q-Learning, Actor-Critic, etc. are heuristic and do not offer performance guarantees. In contrast, model-based learning methods offer performance guarantees, but can only be applied with bounded state spaces. In the thesis, we propose to use model-based reinforcement learning. By applying Lyapunov analysis, our algorithm can be applied to queueing networks with unbounded state spaces. We prove that under our algorithm, the average queue backlog can get arbitrarily close to the optimal result. We also implement simulations to illustrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Liu, Bai(Aerospace scientist)Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Eytan Modiano.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122414

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122414