Deadline-Constrained Multi-Agent Collaborative Transmission for Delay-Sensitive Applications

Delay-sensitive applications impose the strict deadline-constrained latency requirement for end-to-end transmission. However, due to the high dynamics of link status and the limited network resources, it is still challenging to ensure deterministic end-to-end latency for deadline-constrained flows. To this end, we propose a deadline-constrained multi-agent collaborative transmission mechanism (DMCT). Specially, DMCT is featured by combining dynamic routing and packet active dropping control to avoid additional end-to-end latency. Firstly, we design a specific packet structure to detect network status and aware the deadline of each flow. Secondly, to enhance the precision of routing decision, we further formulate deadline-constrained flow scheduling as a joint minimization problem that considers the deadline of flows, queuing delay, and network status. Then, we propose a multi-agent collaborative routing algorithm to find the solution to the joint minimization problem. Finally, we propose a local-agent deadline-constrained active queue management algorithm for packet active dropping control and routing adjustment. Simulation results show that the proposed DMCT outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions, e.g., graph convolutional network-based deep reinforcement learning (GCNL) and delay-based shortest path first (D-SPF), in terms of one-way round-trip time, drop rate, and queue length.