Neural network-assisted decision-making for adaptive routing strategy in optical datacenter networks

To improve the blocking probability (BP) performance and enhance the resource utilization, a correct decision of routing strategy which is most adaptable to the network configuration and traffic dynamics is essential for adaptive routing in optical datacenter networks (DCNs). A neural network (NN)-assisted decision-making scheme is proposed to find the optimal routing strategy in optical DCNs by predicting the BP performance for various candidate routing strategies. The features of an optical DCN architecture (i.e., the rack number N, connection degree D, spectral slot number S and optical transceiver number M) and the traffic pattern (i.e., the ratio of requests of various capacities R, and the load of arriving request) are used as the input to the NN to estimate the optimal routing strategy. A case of two-strategy decision in the transparent optical multi-hop interconnected DCN is studied. Three metrics are defined for performance evaluation, which include (a) the ratio of the load range with wrong decision over the whole load range of interest (i.e., decision error E), (b) the maximum BP loss (BPL) and (c) the resource utilization loss (UL) caused by the wrong decision. Numerical results show that the ratio of error-free cases over tested cases always surpasses 83% and the average values of E, BPL and UL are less than 3.0%, 4.0% and 1.2%, respectively, which implies the high accuracy of the proposed scheme. The results validate the feasibility of the proposed scheme which facilitates the autonomous implementation of adaptive routing in optical DCNs.