Learning-based Network Path Planning for Traffic Engineering

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordRecent advances in traffic engineering offer a series of techniques to address the network problems due to the explosive growth of Internet traffic. In traffic engineering, dynamic path planning is essential for prevalent applications, e.g., load balancing, traffic monitoring and firewall. Application-specific methods can indeed improve the network performance but can hardly be extended to general scenarios. Meanwhile, massive data generated in the current Internet has not been fully exploited, which may convey much valuable knowledge and information to facilitate traffic engineering. In this paper, we propose a learning-based network path planning method under forwarding constraints for finer-grained and effective traffic engineering. We form the path planning problem as the problem of inferring a sequence of nodes in a network path and adapt a sequence-to-sequence model to learn implicit forwarding paths based on empirical network traffic data. To boost the model performance, attention mechanism and beam search are adapted to capture the essential sequential features of the nodes in a path and guarantee the path connectivity. To validate the effectiveness of the derived model, we implement it in Mininet emulator environment and leverage the traffic data generated by both a real-world GEANT network topology and a grid network topology to train and evaluate the model. Experiment results exhibit a high testing accuracy and imply the superiority of our proposal.This work is partially supported by the UK EPSRC project (Grant No.:EP/R030863/1

Data-driven dynamic resource scheduling for network slicing: A Deep reinforcement learning approach

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordNetwork slicing is designed to support a variety of emerging applications with diverse performance and flexibility requirements, by dividing the physical network into multiple logical networks. These applications along with a massive number of mobile phones produce large amounts of data, bringing tremendous challenges for network slicing performance. From another perspective, this huge amount of data also offers a new opportunity for the management of network slicing resources. Leveraging the knowledge and insights retrieved from the data, we develop a novel Machine Learning-based scheme for dynamic resource scheduling for networks slicing, aiming to achieve automatic and efficient resource optimisation and End-to-End (E2E) service reliability. However, it is difficult to obtain the user-related data, which is crucial to understand the user behaviour and requests, due to the privacy issue. Therefore, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is leveraged to extract knowledge from experience by interacting with the network and enable dynamic adjustment of the resources allocated to various slices in order to maximise the resource utilisation while guaranteeing the Quality-of-Service (QoS). The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed resource scheduling scheme can dynamically allocate resources for multiple slices and meet the corresponding QoS requirements.Huawe

Local experts finding using user comments in location-based social networks

The opinions of local experts in the location-based social network are of great significance to the collection and dissemination of local information. In this paper, we investigated in-depth how the user comments can be used to identify the local expert over social networks. We first illustrate the existences of potential local experts in a social network using a scored model by considering the personal profiles, comments, friend relationship, and location preferences. Then, a multi-dimensional model is proposed to evaluate the local expert candidates and a local expert discovery algorithm is proposed to identify local experts. Meanwhile, a scoring algorithm is proposed to train the weights in the model. Finally, an expert recommendation list can be given based on the score ranks of the candidates. Experimental results demonstrate that effectiveness of proposed model and algorithm

Deep Learning and Dempster-Shafer Theory Based Insider Threat Detection

Organizations' own personnel now have a greater ability than ever before to misuse their access to critical organizational assets. Insider threat detection is a key component in identifying rare anomalies in context, which is a growing concern for many organizations. Existing perimeter security mechanisms are proving to be ineffective against insider threats. As a prospective filter for the human analysts, a new deep learning based insider threat detection method that uses the Dempster-Shafer theory is proposed to handle both accidental as well as intentional insider threats via organization's channels of communication in real time. The long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture is applied to a recurrent neural network (RNN) in this work to detect anomalous network behavior patterns. Furthermore, belief is updated with Dempster's conditional rule and utilized to fuse evidence to achieve enhanced prediction. The CERT Insider Threat Dataset v6.2 is used to train the behavior model. Through performance evaluation, our proposed method is proven to be effective as an insider threat detection technique

A Graph Neural Network-based Digital Twin for Network Slicing Management

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via the DOI in this recordNetwork slicing has emerged as a promising networking paradigm to provide resources tailored for Industry 4.0 and diverse services in 5G networks. However, the increased network complexity poses a huge challenge in network management due to virtualised infrastructure and stringent Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. Digital twin (DT) technology paves a way for achieving cost-efficient and performance-optimal management, through creating a virtual representation of slicing-enabled networks digitally to simulate its behaviours and predict the time-varying performance. In this paper, a scalable DT of network slicing is developed, aiming to capture the intertwined relationships among slices and monitor the end-to-end (E2E) metrics of slices under diverse network environments. The proposed DT exploits the novel Graph Neural Network model that can learn insights directly from slice-enabled networks represented by non-Euclidean graph structures. Experimental results show that the DT can accurately mirror the network behaviour and predict E2E latency under various topologies and unseen environments.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Sustainable Secure Management Against APT Attacks for Intelligent Embedded-Enabled Smart Manufacturing

Intelligent embedded-enable smart manufacturing is an important infrastructure for future industries. Increasing security threats are disturbing the normal operations of smart manufacturing. As a novel type of threat, an advanced persistent threat (APT) has the novel features of strong concealment, latency, and long-term entanglement, which can penetrate the core systems of smart manufacturing, especially for intelligent embedded systems, and cause great destruction from the cyber side to physical side. However, the existing security schemes cannot provide sustainable resource management, which causes the core system in smart manufacturing not to perform sustainable secure detection and defense against APTs. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a sustainable secure management mechanism for smart manufacturing against APTs. The proposed mechanism includes two parts: sustainable threat intelligence analysis and sustainable secure resource management. Sustainable threat intelligence analysis provides sustainable discovery of the indications of potential APTs, which has features of a weak signal, low correlation, and slow time variation. The sustainable secure resource management provides deep and continuous protection for intelligent embedded systems in smart manufacturing. The evaluations show the defense capabilities and the feasibility of the proposed mechanism

Learning-based network path planning for traffic engineering

Recent advances in traffic engineering offer a series of techniques to address the network problems due to the explosive growth of Internet traffic. In traffic engineering, dynamic path planning is essential for prevalent applications, e.g., load balancing, traffic monitoring and firewall. Application-specific methods can indeed improve the network performance but can hardly be extended to general scenarios. Meanwhile, massive data generated in the current Internet has not been fully exploited, which may convey much valuable knowledge and information to facilitate traffic engineering. In this paper, we propose a learning-based network path planning method under forwarding constraints for finer-grained and effective traffic engineering. We form the path planning problem as the problem of inferring a sequence of nodes in a network path and adapt a sequence-to-sequence model to learn implicit forwarding paths based on empirical network traffic data. To boost the model performance, attention mechanism and beam search are adapted to capture the essential sequential features of the nodes in a path and guarantee the path connectivity. To validate the effectiveness of the derived model, we implement it in Mininet emulator environment and leverage the traffic data generated by both a real-world GEANT network topology and a grid network topology to train and evaluate the model. Experiment results exhibit a high testing accuracy and imply the superiority of our proposal