Scalable Traffic Allocation in Dynamic Networks via End-to-End Imitation Learning

Abstract

Networks with highly dynamic data transmission demands and network topologies are common in real world. A fundamental problem in such networks is achieving scalable traffic allocation to maximize long-term total throughput under link capacity constraints. However, state-of-the-art (SOTA) works lack scalability. This is primarily due to two reasons in large-scale networks: first, they require solving constrained optimization problems online, which leads to high decision latency; second, they rely on reinforcement learning algorithms for policy optimization, which are inefficient in exploration and challenging to train effectively. To address these issues, we propose the Fast Networked Control (FNC) policy framework, which firstly utilizes parallelizable neural network modules to process the state and generate raw decisions, followed by basic operations such as normalizations and comparisons, which do not require iteration or optimization, to obtain decisions that satisfy the constraints. Hence, FNC policy avoids solving constrained optimization problems and supports parallel execution, significantly reducing decision latency. Furthermore, this policy preserves gradient flow and supports backpropagation, which enable us to design an imitation learning algorithm to efficiently train the policy in an end-to-end manner. Experiments in large-scale networks show that our FNC policy achieves an average 8% improvement in demands satisfaction and 10 times reduction in decision latency versus SOTA works.