Flow Allocation in Industrial Intent-based Networks
Barun Kumar Saha, Luca Haab, Lukasz Podleski · 2019
Intent-based Networks (IBNs) are expected to add various degrees of autonomy and intelligence at different stages of a network, such as planning and operating. A particular use case of IBNs relevant to industry is that of end-to-end flow (service) allocation prior to commissioning such networks, for example, in power grids. In this context, we investigate the flow allocation problem for large networks by considering four schemes. In Shortest Path-based Allocation (SPA), all-pair shortest paths in a network are computed, which are then used to allocate the feasible flows. To prevent near-maximal link utilization, we consider a variation of SPA with usage threshold (SPA-T). The two other schemes, SPA with probabilistic Hill Climbing (SPA-HC) and SPA with Simulated Annealing (SPA-SA), also impose a similar utilization limit on each link. Moreover, SPA-HC and SPA-SA allocate the flows in a way to improve the relative fairness. Results of performance evaluation using data from real-life and synthetically generated networks show that the proposed schemes can allocate 86%-99% flows when link utilization threshold is varied from 0.75 to 0.95.