Multi-path Transmission Strategy for Deterministic Networks

With the rapid growth of internet traffic, network congestion becomes more and more severe, which causes massive packets loss. The reliability and delay of data transmission needs to be guaranteed in real-time applications such as financial transactions and cloud games. Traditional transmission strategies use packet retransmission to ensure data reliability, but the retransmission causes extra delay. The extra delay reduces the quality of service (QoS) for deterministic services. For the above problem, this paper proposes a deterministic network (DetNet)-oriented multipath transmission strategy in the software-defined network (SDN) architecture. The architecture introduces the packet replication and elimination function (PREF) of DetNet to achieve reliable transmission. The strategy establishes a path optimization model with transmission delay and packet loss rate, and then solve the model by the Q-learning algorithm. The delay and packet loss rate of the link construct the reward function. The Q-value table enables to obtain the best combination of paths, and it is gained by the reward function. Simulations show that our strategy have lower packet loss rate and delay jitter than the traditional single-path transmission strategy and the multi-path transmission strategy.