Jean P. Martins

Satheesh K. Perepu, Jean P. Martins, Ricardo Souza S et al.

Recently, intent-based management has received good attention in telecom networks owing to stringent performance requirements for many of the use cases. Several approaches in the literature employ traditional closed-loop driven methods to fulfill the intents on the KPIs. However, these methods consider every closed-loop independent of each other which degrades the combined performance. Also, such existing methods are not easily scalable. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) techniques have shown significant promise in many areas in which traditional closed-loop control falls short, typically for complex coordination and conflict management among loops. In this work, we propose a method based on MARL to achieve intent-based management without the need for knowing a model of the underlying system. Moreover, when there are conflicting intents, the MARL agents can implicitly incentivize the loops to cooperate and promote trade-offs, without human interaction, by prioritizing the important KPIs. Experiments have been performed on a network emulator for optimizing KPIs of three services. Results obtained demonstrate that the proposed system performs quite well and is able to fulfill all existing intents when there are enough resources or prioritize the KPIs when resources are scarce.

Jean Martins, Igor Almeida, Ricardo Souza et al.

As mobile networks embrace the 5G era, the interest in adopting Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms to handle challenges in ultra-low-latency and high throughput scenarios increases. Simultaneously, the advent of packetized fronthaul networks imposes demanding requirements that traditional congestion control mechanisms cannot accomplish, highlighting the potential of RL-based congestion control algorithms. Although learning RL policies optimized for satisfying the stringent fronthaul requirements is feasible, the adoption of neural network models in real deployments still poses some challenges regarding real-time inference and interpretability. This paper proposes a methodology to deal with such challenges while maintaining the performance and generalization capabilities provided by a baseline RL policy. The method consists of (1) training a congestion control policy specialized in fronthaul-like networks via reinforcement learning, (2) collecting state-action experiences from the baseline, and (3) performing deep symbolic regression on the collected dataset. The proposed process overcomes the challenges related to inference-time limitations through closed-form expressions that approximate the baseline performance (link utilization, delay, and fairness) and which can be directly implemented in any programming language. Finally, we analyze the inner workings of the closed-form expressions.

Jean P. Martins

The multidimensional knapsack problem (MKP) is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem whose solution is determining a subset of maximum total profit items that do not violate capacity constraints. Due to its hardness, large-scale MKP instances are usually a target for metaheuristics, a context in which effective feasibility maintenance strategies are crucial. In 1998, Chu and Beasley proposed an effective heuristic repair that is still relevant for recent metaheuristics. However, due to its deterministic nature, the diversity of solutions such heuristic provides is insufficient for long runs. As a result, the search for new solutions ceases after a while. This paper proposes an efficiency-based randomization strategy for the heuristic repair that increases the variability of the repaired solutions without deteriorating quality and improves the overall results.