Deep reinforcement learning meets graph neural networks: Exploring a routing optimization use case
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown a dramatic improvement in decision-making and automated control problems. Consequently, DRL represents a promising technique to efficiently solve many relevant optimization problems (e.g., routing) in self-driving networks. However, existing DRL-based solu...
| Autores: | , , , , |
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| 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:2117/377030 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/2117/377030 https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2022.09.029 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Decision-making Reinforcement learning Routing (Computer network management) Graph neural networks Optimization Decisió, Presa de Aprenentatge per reforç Encaminament (Gestió de xarxes d'ordinadors) Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Enginyeria de la telecomunicació::Telemàtica i xarxes d'ordinadors Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Intel·ligència artificial::Aprenentatge automàtic |
| Sumario: | Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown a dramatic improvement in decision-making and automated control problems. Consequently, DRL represents a promising technique to efficiently solve many relevant optimization problems (e.g., routing) in self-driving networks. However, existing DRL-based solutions applied to networking fail to generalize, which means that they are not able to operate properly when applied to network topologies not observed during training. This lack of generalization capability significantly hinders the deployment of DRL technologies in production networks. This is because state-of-the-art DRL-based networking solutions use standard neural networks (e.g., fully connected, convolutional), which are not suited to learn from information structured as graphs. In this paper, we integrate Graph Neural Networks (GNN) into DRL agents and we design a problem specific action space to enable generalization. GNNs are Deep Learning models inherently designed to generalize over graphs of different sizes and structures. This allows the proposed GNN-based DRL agent to learn and generalize over arbitrary network topologies. We test our DRL+GNN agent in a routing optimization use case in optical networks and evaluate it on 180 and 232 unseen synthetic and real-world network topologies respectively. The results show that the DRL+GNN agent is able to outperform state-of-the-art solutions in topologies never seen during training. |
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