ENERO: Efficient real-time WAN routing optimization with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Wide Area Networks (WAN) are a key infrastructure in today’s society. During the last years, WANs have seen a considerable increase in network’s traffic and network applications, imposing new requirements on existing network technologies (e.g., low latency and high throughput). Consequently, Interne...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Almasan Puscas, Felician Paul|||0000-0003-3903-6759, Xiao, Shihan, Cheng, Xiangle, Shi, Xiang, Barlet Ros, Pere|||0000-0001-7837-0886, Cabellos Aparicio, Alberto|||0000-0001-9329-7584
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2022
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/374335
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/374335
https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2022.109166
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Telecommunication -- Traffic -- Management
Routing (Computer network management)
Neural networks (Computer science)
Deep learning
Optimization
Deep reinforcement learning
Graph neural networks
Telecomunicació -- Tràfic -- Gestió
Encaminament (Gestió de xarxes d'ordinadors)
Xarxes neuronals (Informàtica)
Aprenentatge profund
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Enginyeria de la telecomunicació::Telemàtica i xarxes d'ordinadors
Descripción
Sumario:Wide Area Networks (WAN) are a key infrastructure in today’s society. During the last years, WANs have seen a considerable increase in network’s traffic and network applications, imposing new requirements on existing network technologies (e.g., low latency and high throughput). Consequently, Internet Service Providers (ISP) are under pressure to ensure the customer’s Quality of Service and fulfill Service Level Agreements. Network operators leverage Traffic Engineering (TE) techniques to efficiently manage the network’s resources. However, WAN’s traffic can drastically change during time and the connectivity can be affected due to external factors (e.g., link failures). Therefore, TE solutions must be able to adapt to dynamic scenarios in real-time. In this paper we propose Enero, an efficient real-time TE solution based on a two-stage optimization process. In the first one, Enero leverages Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to optimize the routing configuration by generating a long-term TE strategy. To enable efficient operation over dynamic network scenarios (e.g., when link failures occur), we integrated a Graph Neural Network into the DRL agent. In the second stage, Enero uses a Local Search algorithm to improve DRL’s solution without adding computational overhead to the optimization process. The experimental results indicate that Enero is able to operate in real-world dynamic network topologies in 4.5 s on average for topologies up to 100 links.