Reinforcement Learning-Based Underwater Video Transmission Against Jamming

Existing adaptive modulation and coding schemes suffer from performance degradation under time-varying underwater acoustic channels and jamming attacks, resulting in increased video jitter and energy consumption, as well as reduced peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). In this paper, we first propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based underwater video transmission scheme, which jointly optimizes the channel coding methods, subcarrier modulation order, quantization parameter, and transmit power against jamming. The direct sequence spread spectrum mechanism is used to reduce the jamming power in each subcarrier frequency band, which ensures that the transmitter obtains a reliable feedback message. In addition, a multi-frame statistical scheme is designed to support transmission policy selection, which mitigates the impact of channel instability by averaging the observed transmission performance and channel gain. To further enhance communication performance and robustness under large state-action spaces and dynamic channel conditions, we propose a deep RL (DRL)-based anti-jamming video transmission scheme to compress the excessive state-action space, mitigate quantization errors, and improve transmission stability. Two target networks are employed in DRL to ensure learning stability by mitigating fluctuations in Q-value and R-value updates caused by the time-varying channel. In addition, the performance bounds of transmission delay and energy consumption related to modulation order and channel coding rate are derived. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that our schemes improve the video transmission performance by reducing transmission delay, energy consumption, and video jitter while increasing PSNR and video quality compared with the benchmarks.