Policy Reuse for Communication Load Balancing in Unseen Traffic Scenarios

Abstract: With the continuous growth in communication network complexity and traffic volume, communication load balancing solutions are receiving increasing attention. Specifically, reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods have shown impressive performance compared with traditional rule-based methods. However, standard RL methods generally require an enormous amount of data to train, and generalize poorly to scenarios that are not encountered during training. We propose a policy reuse framework in which a policy selector chooses the most suitable pre-trained RL policy to execute based on the current traffic condition. Our method hinges on a policy bank composed of policies trained on a diverse set of traffic scenarios. When deploying to an unknown traffic scenario, we select a policy from the policy bank based on the similarity between the previous-day traffic of the current scenario and the traffic observed during training. Experiments demonstrate that this framework can outperform classical and adaptive rule-based methods by a large margin.