Reinforcement learning for QoS-guaranteed intelligent routing in Wireless Mesh Networks with heavy traffic load

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks is increasingly being applied widely with explosive traffic demand. This leads to a great challenge for traditional routing protocols in ensuring Quality of Service. We propose a QoS-guaranteed intelligent routing algorithm in this paper for WMN with heavy traffic load using reinforcement learning to improve its performance. We build a reward function for the Q-Learning algorithm to choose a route so that the packet delivery ratio is the highest. Concurrently, the learning rate coefficient is flexibly changed to determine constraints of the end-to-end delay. Our performance evaluations show that the proposed algorithm has significantly improved performance compared with other well-known routing algorithms.