Applications of multi-agent reinforcement learning in future internet: a comprehensive survey

Future Internet involves several emerging technologies such as 5G and beyond 5G networks, vehicular networks, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, and Internet of Things (IoTs). Moreover, the future Internet becomes heterogeneous and decentralized with a large number of involved network entities. Each entity may need to make its local decision to improve the network performance under dynamic and uncertain network environments. Standard learning algorithms such as single-agent Reinforcement Learning (RL) or Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have been recently used to enable each network entity as an agent to learn an optimal decision-making policy adaptively through interacting with the unknown environments. However, such an algorithm fails to model the cooperations or competitions among network entities, and simply treats other entities as a part of the environment that may result in the non-stationarity issue. Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) allows each network entity to learn its optimal policy by observing not only the environments but also other entities' policies. As a result, MARL can significantly improve the learning efficiency of the network entities, and it has been recently used to solve various issues in the emerging networks. In this paper, we thus review the applications of MARL in emerging networks. In particular, we provide a tutorial of MARL and a comprehensive survey of applications of MARL in next-generation Internet. In particular, we first introduce single-agent RL and MARL. Then, we review a number of applications of MARL to solve emerging issues in the future Internet. The issues consist of network access, transmit power control, computation offloading, content caching, packet routing, trajectory design for UAV-aided networks, and network security issues. Finally, we discuss the challenges, open issues, and future directions related to the applications of MARL in the future Internet.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 62071230 and Grant 62061146002, and in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province under Grant BK20211567