Data-driven Routing Optimization based on Programmable Data Plane

To meet the growing demand for high bandwidth of Multimedia network, IP Network Providers spend millions of dollars overprovisioning bandwidth of their network. However, due to the lack of reasonable traffic scheduling, the over-provisioning network still has a severe issue of utilization imbalance. Traffic Engineering (TE) is proposed to solve this problem. Network measurement and routing optimization strategies are two key components of TE. Effective real-time network measurement provides the basis for the generation of route optimization strategies, which makes the network congestion-aware. Existing out-band network telemetry that transmits extra probes to measure network status has the problem of inaccurate measurement information in the network. Besides, the relationship between complex network status and routing optimization strategy is difficult to describe with an exact mathematical model. Therefore, we propose a novel TE approach, which is called DPRO. It combines In-band Network Telemetry based on programmable language P4 with Reinforcement Learning to minimize network max-link-utilization. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms several widely-used baseline methods in terms of max-link-utilization.