Intelligent End-to-End Deterministic Scheduling Across Converged Networks

Deterministic network services play a vital role for supporting emerging real-time applications with bounded low latency, jitter, and high reliability. The deterministic guarantee is penetrated into various types of networks, such as 5G, WiFi, satellite, and edge computing networks. From the user’s perspective, the real-time applications require end-to-end deterministic guarantee across the converged network. In this paper, we investigate the end-to-end deterministic guarantee problem across the whole converged network, aiming to provide a scalable method for different kinds of converged networks to meet the bounded end-to-end latency, jitter, and high reliability demands of each flow, while improving the network scheduling QoS. Particularly, we set up the global end-to-end control plane to abstract the deterministic-related resources from converged network, and model the deterministic flow transmission by using the abstracted resources. With the resource abstraction, our model can work well for different underlying technologies. Given large amounts of abstracted resources in our model, it is difficult for traditional algorithms to fully utilize the resources. Thus, we propose a deep reinforcement learning based end-to-end deterministic-related resource scheduling (E2eDRS) algorithm to schedule the network resources from end to end. By setting the action groups, the E2eDRS can support varying network dimensions both in horizontal and vertical end-to-end deterministic-related network architectures. Experimental results show that E2eDRS can averagely increase 1.33x and 6.01x schedulable flow number for horizontal scheduling compared with MultiDRS and MultiNaive algorithms, respectively. The E2eDRS can also optimize 2.65x and 3.87x server load balance than MultiDRS and MultiNaive algorithms, respectively. For vertical scheduling, the E2eDRS can still perform better on schedulable flow number and server load balance.