Towards a Learning-Based Framework for Self-Driving Design of Networking Protocols

Networking protocols are designed through long-standing and hard-working human efforts. Machine Learning (ML)-based solutions for communication protocol design have been developed to avoid manual effort to adjust individual protocol parameters. While other proposed ML-based methods focus mainly on tuning individual protocol parameters (e.g. contention window adjustment), our main contribution is to propose a new Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) framework to systematically design and evaluate networking protocols. We decouple the protocol into a set of parametric modules, each representing the main protocol functionality that is used as a DRL input to better understand and systematically analyze the optimization of generated protocols. As a case study, we introduce and evaluate DeepMAC a framework in which the MAC protocol is decoupled into a set of blocks across popular 802.11 WLANs (e.g. 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac). We are interested to see which blocks are selected by DeepMAC across different networking scenarios and whether DeepMAC is capable of adapting to network dynamics.