Efficient Data-Driven Network Functions
Zhiyuan Yao, Yoann Desmouceaux, Juan-Antonio Cordero-Fuertes, Mark Townsley, Thomas Clausen · 2022
Cloud environments require dynamic and adaptive networking policies. It is preferred to use heuristics over advanced learning algorithms in Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) in production because of high-performance constraints. This paper proposes Aquarius to passively yet efficiently gather observations and enable the use of machine learning to collect, infer, and supply accurate networking state information - without incurring additional signaling and management overhead. This paper illustrates the use of Aquarius with a traffic classifier, an auto-scaling system, and a load balancer - and demonstrates the use of three different machine learning paradigms - unsupervised, supervised, and reinforcement learning, within Aquarius, for inferring network state. Testbed evaluations show that Aquarius increases network state visibility and brings notable performance gains with low overhead.