Learning-based network path planning for traffic engineering

Recent advances in traffic engineering offer a series of techniques to address the network problems due to the explosive growth of Internet traffic. In traffic engineering, dynamic path planning is essential for prevalent applications, e.g., load balancing, traffic monitoring and firewall. Application-specific methods can indeed improve the network performance but can hardly be extended to general scenarios. Meanwhile, massive data generated in the current Internet has not been fully exploited, which may convey much valuable knowledge and information to facilitate traffic engineering. In this paper, we propose a learning-based network path planning method under forwarding constraints for finer-grained and effective traffic engineering. We form the path planning problem as the problem of inferring a sequence of nodes in a network path and adapt a sequence-to-sequence model to learn implicit forwarding paths based on empirical network traffic data. To boost the model performance, attention mechanism and beam search are adapted to capture the essential sequential features of the nodes in a path and guarantee the path connectivity. To validate the effectiveness of the derived model, we implement it in Mininet emulator environment and leverage the traffic data generated by both a real-world GEANT network topology and a grid network topology to train and evaluate the model. Experiment results exhibit a high testing accuracy and imply the superiority of our proposal. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.