Neural Network Meets DCN: Traffic-driven Topology Adaptation with Deep Learning

The emerging optical/wireless topology reconfiguration technologies have shown great potential in improving the performance of data center networks. However, it also poses a big challenge on how to find the best topology configurations to support the dynamic traffic demands. In this work, we present xWeaver, a traffic-driven deep learning solution to infer the high-performance network topology online. xWeaver supports a powerful network model that enables the topology optimization over different performance metrics and network architectures. With the design of properly-structured neural networks, it can automatically derive the critical traffic patterns from data traces and learn the underlying mapping between the traffic patterns and topology configurations specific to the target data center. After offline training, xWeaver generates the optimized (or near-optimal) topology configuration online, and can also smoothly update its model parameters for new traffic patterns. The experiment results show the significant performance gain of xWeaver in supporting smaller flow completion time.