Traffic Engineering in Large-scale Networks with Generalizable Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2503.24203v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traffic Engineering (TE) in large-scale networks like cloud Wide Area Networks (WANs) and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations is a critical challenge. Although learning-based approaches have been proposed to address the scalability of traditional TE algorithms, their practical application is often hindered by a lack of generalization, high training overhead, and a failure to respect link capacities. This paper proposes TELGEN, a novel TE algorithm that learns to solve TE problems efficiently in large-scale network scenarios, while achieving superior generalizability across diverse network conditions. TELGEN is based on the novel idea of transforming the problem of "predicting the optimal TE solution" into "predicting the optimal TE algorithm", which enables TELGEN to learn and efficiently approximate the end-to-end solving process of classical optimal TE algorithms. The learned algorithm is agnostic to the exact underlying network topology or traffic patterns, and is able to very efficiently solve TE problems given arbitrary inputs and generalize well to unseen topologies and demands. We train and evaluate TELGEN with random and real-world topologies, with networks of up to 5000 nodes and 3.6x10^6 links in testing. TELGEN shows less than 3% optimality gap while ensuring feasibility in all testing scenarios, even when the test network has 2-20x more nodes than the largest training network. It also saves up to 84% TE solving time than traditional interior-point method, and reduces up to 79.6% training time per epoch than the state-of-the-art learning-based algorithm.

Abstract:Traffic Engineering (TE) in large-scale networks like cloud Wide Area Networks (WANs) and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations is a critical challenge. Although learning-based approaches have been proposed to address the scalability of traditional TE algorithms, their practical application is often hindered by a lack of generalization, high training overhead, and a failure to respect link capacities. This paper proposes TELGEN, a novel TE algorithm that learns to solve TE problems efficiently in large-scale network scenarios, while achieving superior generalizability across diverse network conditions. TELGEN is based on the novel idea of transforming the problem of "predicting the optimal TE solution" into "predicting the optimal TE algorithm", which enables TELGEN to learn and efficiently approximate the end-to-end solving process of classical optimal TE algorithms. The learned algorithm is agnostic to the exact underlying network topology or traffic patterns, and is able to very efficiently solve TE problems given arbitrary inputs and generalize well to unseen topologies and demands. We train and evaluate TELGEN with random and real-world topologies, with networks of up to 5000 nodes and 3.6x10^6 links in testing. TELGEN shows less than 3% optimality gap while ensuring feasibility in all testing scenarios, even when the test network has 2-20x more nodes than the largest training network. It also saves up to 84% TE solving time than traditional interior-point method, and reduces up to 79.6% training time per epoch than the state-of-the-art learning-based algorithm.

Updated version to include link to new open-source repository. The previous repo was invalidated due to institutional Github license change. The code and detailed instructions for reproduction are now hosted in a public repo

Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2503.24203 [cs.NI]

(or arXiv:2503.24203v3 [cs.NI] for this version)

aiqbench analysis

Traffic Engineering in Large-scale Networks with Generalizable Graph Neural Networks

Related coverage