When Machine Learning Meets Congestion Control: A Survey and Comparison

Abstract: Machine learning (ML) has seen a significant surge and uptake across many diverse applications. The high flexibility, adaptability and computing capabilities it provides extends traditional approaches used in multiple fields including network operation and management. Numerous surveys have explored ML in the context of networking, such as traffic engineering, performance optimization and network security. Many ML approaches focus on clustering, classification, regression and reinforcement learning (RL). The innovation of this research and contribution of this paper lies in the detailed summary and comparison of learning-based congestion control (CC) approaches. Compared with traditional CC algorithms which are typically rule-based, capabilities to learn from historical experience are highly desirable. From the literature, it is observed that RL is a crucial trend among learning-based CC algorithms. In this paper, we explore the performance of RL-based CC algorithms and present current problems with RL-based CC algorithms. We outline challenges and trends related to learning-based CC algorithms.