Space-Air-Ground Integrated Multi-Domain Network Resource Orchestration Based on Virtual Network Architecture: A DRL Method

Traditional ground wireless communication networks cannot provide high-quality services for artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as intelligent transportation systems (ITS) due to deployment, coverage and capacity issues. The space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) has become a research focus in the industry. Compared with traditional wireless communication networks, SAGIN is more flexible and reliable, and it has wider coverage and higher quality of seamless connection. However, due to its inherent heterogeneity, time-varying and self-organizing characteristics, the deployment and use of SAGIN still faces huge challenges, among which the orchestration of heterogeneous resources is a key issue. Based on virtual network architecture and deep reinforcement learning (DRL), we model SAGIN’s heterogeneous resource orchestration as a multi-domain virtual network embedding (VNE) problem, and propose a SAGIN cross-domain VNE algorithm. We model the different network segments of SAGIN, and set the network attributes according to the actual situation of SAGIN and user needs. In DRL, the agent is acted by a five-layer policy network. We build a feature matrix based on network attributes extracted from SAGIN and use it as the agent training environment. Through training, the probability of each underlying node being embedded can be derived. In test phase, we complete the embedding process of virtual nodes and links in turn based on this probability. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of the algorithm from both training and testing.