Differentiated Federated Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic and Heterogeneous Network

The modern dynamic and heterogeneous network brings differential environments with respective state transition probability to agents, which leads to the local strategy trap problem of traditional federated reinforcement learning (FRL) based network optimization algorithm. To solve this problem, we propose a novel Differentiated Federated Reinforcement Learning (DFRL), which evolves the global policy model integration and local inference with the global policy model in traditional FRL to a collaborative learning process with parallel global trends learning and differential local policy model learning. In the DFRL, the local policy learning model is adaptively updated with the global trends model and local environment and achieves better differentiated adaptation. We evaluate the outperformance of the proposal compared with the state-of-the-art FRL in a classical CartPole game with heterogeneous environments. Furthermore, we implement the proposal in the heterogeneous Space-air-ground Integrated Network (SAGIN) for the classical traffic offloading problem in network. The simulation result shows that the proposal shows better global performance and fairness than baselines in terms of throughput, delay, and packet drop rate.