Distributed Routing and Data Scheduling in IPNs With GNN-Based Multiagent DRL

As deep space exploration missions grow in complexity, efficient data transfer in interplanetary networks (IPNs) becomes paramount. However, the vast distances, limited bandwidth, and dynamic nature of IPNs pose significant challenges for the routing and data scheduling of interplanetary data transfers (IP-DTs). To address these challenges, this work proposes a novel distributed, graph neural network (GNN) based multiagent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach that can jointly optimize the routing and scheduling of IP-DTs. Our proposal is based on the proximal policy optimization (PPO) framework along with the graph attention networks (GATs). We make the DRL agents for IPN nodes in each subnetwork around a celestial body learn and operate independently, for making intelligent routing and scheduling decisions to properly tradeoff between average end-to-end (E2E) latency and delivery ratio of IP-DTs while ensuring good scalability. Extensive simulations confirm that our proposal handles the routing and scheduling of IP-DTs much better than existing benchmarks. Further, by modifying the interplanetary overlay network (ION) software platform developed by NASA, we build a semi-physical IPN emulator based on Raspberry Pi boards, implement our proposal in it, and conduct experiments with real data transfers between IPN nodes. Experimental results verify that our proposal can work for practical IPNs without causing excessive overheads and prove its advantages.