An SDN Traffic Engineering Approach Based on Traffic Unsupervised Contrastive Representation and Reinforcement Learning

An SDN Traffic Engineering Approach Based on Traffic Unsupervised Contrastive Representation and Reinforcement Learning

연구 분야: Networking

학회: 2024 Sixth International Conference on Next Generation Data-driven Networks (NGDN)

With the rapid development of Internet technology and the continuous explosive growth of network traffic, Traffic Engineering (TE), as a viable method for optimizing network traffic distribution and improving network performance, attracts widespread attention from both industry and academia. Software Defined Networks (SDN), which decouples the data plane and the control plane, realizes a flexible routing and improves the TE performance. Existing TE approaches in SDN mainly utilize Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods to learn the mapping relationship between network traffic and routing policies. However, due to the continuous expansion of network size and dynamic changes in traffic, the enlargement of traffic state space hinders RL from converging to the optimal routing policy, leading to a decline in network performance. To address these issues, this paper presents a TE method based on unsupervised contrastive representation and RL. This method first shrinks the original traffic state space by efficiently extracting traffic features through Contrastive Learning (CL), aiding quick convergence of RL. It then uses RL to directly learn the mapping from traffic features to traffic splitting policies. Finally, through numerous experiments on real network traffic and topology, it demonstrates that the proposed TE method can effectively achieve load balancing of network traffic under complex and volatile dynamic traffic demands, thereby enhancing network performance.