NetRepAIr: Making networks reliable for next-generation applications using AI/ML techniques

Networks have grown from small topologies connecting a dozen of devices to large, shared infrastructures supporting primary needs of our society. Today, we count on networked services for trading, commuting, monitoring weather conditions, meeting people. In order to provide reliable services, network operators need to cope with the daunting challenge of ensuring millions of flows from heterogeneous devices arrive at their destination on time and showing a reasonable throughput. Despite the significant advances recent Software Defined Networks (SDNs) provided towards managing large scale network infrastructures, they still fall short to enable fault-tolerant, performance-guaranteed data transmissions to the level next-generation applications such as 5G, smart cities, augmented reality and the Tactile Internet demand. In this project, we propose a new view to the problem of network reliability. Through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques, we look for building a smart, highly scalable and robust network repair system. Our design will combine state-of-the-art machine learning techniques such as deep reinforcement learning and graph neural networks with high-performance and flexible network devices (e.g., P4 switches, NetFPGAs, and SmartNICs) to detect and correct network faults with high accuracy and in extremely short timescales.

Faculty Supervisor:

Israat Haque

Student:

Miguel Neves

Partner:

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

University:

Dalhousie University

Program:

Accelerate