A predictive SD-WAN traffic management method for IoT networks in multi-datacenters using deep RNN

Abstract

Deploying the Internet of Things (IoT) in integrated edge-cloud environments exposes the IoT traffic data to performance issues such as delay, bandwidth limitation etc. Recently, Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) has emerged as an architecture that originates from the Software-Defined Network (SDN) paradigm and provides solutions for networking multiple data centers by allowing network administrators to manage and control network layers. In this article, an SDWAN-based policy for traffic management in IoT is introduced in which the Quality of Service (QoS) metrics such as end-to-end delay and bandwidth utilization are optimized. The proposed method implements the traffic management policy in the SDWAN controller. When the IoT traffic flows reach the SDWAN infrastructure network, graph search algorithms are performed to find the near-optimal paths that affect the end-to-end delay of traffic flows. Because of the ability of deep learning to process complex data, a deep RNN model is used to predict the network state information, such as link latency and available bandwidth, before the traffic flows reach the infrastructure network. The proposed method consists of four key modules to predict the routes for future time intervals: (a) an SD-WAN topology updater unit that checks the link changes and availability, (b) the network state information collector, which collects the network state information to create a dataset, (c) the learning unit, which trains a deep RNN model using the created dataset, and (d) the route predictor unit, which uses the trained model to predict the network state information using a heuristic algorithm to determine the routes. The simulation results showed that the deep RNN model can achieve high accuracy and low Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and the proposed method outperforms shortest-path algorithms in terms of latency. At the same time, the available bandwidth is almost fairly distributed among all network links.