Graph-Tensor Neural Networks for Network Traffic Data Imputation

Abstract

It is important to estimate the global network traffic data from partial traffic measurements for many network management tasks, including status monitoring and fault detection. However, existing estimation approaches cannot well handle the topological correlations hidden in network traffic and suffer from limited imputation performance. This paper proposes a deep learning approach for network traffic imputation, which well exploits the topological structure of network traffic. We first model the network traffic as a novel graph-tensor and derive a theoretical recovery guarantee. Then we develop an iterative graph-tensor completion algorithm and propose a graph neural network for network traffic imputation by unfolding the iterative algorithm. The proposed graph neural network well captures the topological correlations of network traffic and achieves accurate imputation. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed graph neural network achieves about one-half lower relative square error while at least ten times faster imputation speed than the existing methods.