Traffic Engineering in Partially Deployed Segment Routing Over IPv6 Network With Deep Reinforcement Learning

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Segment Routing (SR) is a source routing paradigm which is widely used in Traffic Engineering (TE). By using SR, a node steers a packet through an ordered list of instructions called segments. By some extensions of interior gateway protocol, SR can be applied to IP/MPLS or IPv6 network without signal protocol. SR over IPv6 (SRv6) is attracting wide attention because of its interoperation ability with IPv6. However, upgrading the existing IPv6 network directly to a full SRv6 one can be difficult, because large-scale equipment replacement or software upgrade may cause economic and technical problems. TE in partially deployed SR network is becoming a hot research topic. In this paper, we propose the TE algorithm Weight Adjustment-SRTE (WA-SRTE) in partially deployed SRv6 network, in which SRv6 capable nodes are dispersedly deployed. Our objective is to minimize the network’s maximum link utilization. WA-SRTE converts the TE problem into a Deep Reinforcement Learning problem and optimizes the OSPF weight, SRv6 node deployment and traffic paths simultaneously. Besides, traffic variation is also considered and we use a representative Traffic Matrix (TM) to epitomize the traffic characteristics over a period of time. Experiments demonstrate that with 20% to 40% of the SRv6 nodes deployed, we can achieve TE performance as good as in a full SR network for the experiment topologies. The results with WA remarkably outperform the results without it. Our algorithm also gets near-optimal results with changing traffic.