Dealing With Changes: Resilient Routing via Graph Neural Networks and Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

The computer networking community has been steadily increasing investigations into machine learning to help solve tasks such as routing, traffic prediction, and resource management. The traditional best-effort nature of Internet connections allows a single link to be shared among multiple flows competing for network resources, often without consideration of in-network states. In particular, due to the recent successes in other applications, Reinforcement Learning has seen steady growth in network management and, more recently, routing. However, if there are changes in the network topology, retraining is often required to avoid significant performance losses. This restriction has chiefly prevented the deployment of Reinforcement Learning-based routing in real environments. In this paper, we approach routing as a reinforcement learning problem with two novel twists: minimize flow set collisions, and construct a reinforcement learning policy capable of routing in dynamic network conditions without retraining. We compare this approach to other routing protocols, including multi-agent learning, with respect to various Quality-of-Service metrics, and we report our lesson learned.