Cache Allocation in Multi-Tenant Edge Computing: An Online Model-Based Reinforcement Learning Approach

We consider a Network Operator (NO) that owns Edge Computing (EC) resources, virtualizes them and lets third party Service Providers (SPs) run their services, using the allocated slice of resources. We focus on one specific resource, i.e., cache space, and on the problem of how to allocate it among several SPs in order to minimize the backhaul traffic. Due to confidentiality guarantees, the NO cannot observe the nature of the traffic of SPs, which is encrypted. Allocation decisions are thus challenging, since they must be taken solely based on observed monitoring information. Another challenge is that not all the traffic is cacheable. We propose a data-driven cache allocation strategy, based on Reinforcement Learning (RL). Unlike most RL applications, in which the decision policy is learned offline on a simulator, we assume no previous knowledge is available to build such a simulator. We thus apply RL in an online fashion, i.e., the model and the policy are learned by directly perturbing and monitoring the actual system. Since perturbations generate spurious traffic, we thus need to limit perturbations. This requires learning to be extremely efficient. To this aim, we devise a strategy that learns an approximation of the cost function, while interacting with the system. We then use such an approximation in a Model-Based RL (MB-RL) to speed up convergence. We prove analytically that our strategy brings cache allocation boundedly close to the optimum and stably remains in such an allocation. We show in simulations that such convergence is obtained within few minutes. We also study its fairness, its sensitivity to several scenario characteristics and compare it with a method from the state-of-the-art.