Burst Traffic Scheduling for Hybrid E/O Switching DCN: An Error Feedback Spiking Neural Network Approach

Hybrid electrical/optical (E/O) switching data center network (DCN) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for future DCN architectures. However, there exist two major challenges: 1) the traffic is a mixture of both stable and burst components due to the diverse and heterogeneous user demands; 2) current scheduling algorithms are mostly static and not designed for the complex structure of hybrid E/O switching DCN, provoking frequent burst traffic congestion and performance degradation. This article endeavors to overcome the above challenges as follows. We first construct an error feedback-based spiking neural network (SNN) framework with high accuracy burst traffic prediction. We then design a prediction-assisted scheduling algorithm to handle the worst-case burst traffic. On the one hand, the error feedback-based SNN framework can significantly enhance the extraction of burst traffic features by mimicking the biological neuron system. On the other hand, prediction-assisted scheduling arranges the well-predicted traffic using a global evaluation factor and a traffic scaling factor. The simulation results reveal that our approach can efficiently integrate a spiking neural network into the traffic scheduling scheme and achieve satisfying performance with affordable computational complexity.