Intelligent Content-Aware Traffic Engineering for SDN: An AI-Driven Approach

TE is a critical and difficult problem that tries to map traffic with various requirements to paths in dynamic communication networks. The emerging SDN enables centralized TE optimization with a global view. From the architectural viewpoint, ICN facilitates TE from many aspects, such as in-network caching which can reduce redundant traffic and content-awareness which can extract prior knowledge of content type directly. Thus, we leverage ICN to optimize SDN TE. However, ICN brings more complexities and dynamics to the network environment, which makes model-based TE methods inefficient. Inspired by recent advances in applying artificial intelligence techniques to solve complex online control problems, we investigate deep learning for content-awareness and DRL for TE decision. In addition, we propose a parallel online learning mechanism to safely utilize DRL which has trial-and-error nature. Results show that our proposal significantly improves network performance in terms of total network throughput, bandwidth utilization, and load balance.