subflow
Supplementary Material for: The Convolution Exponential and Generalized Sylvester Flows
The inverse of Sylvester flows can be easily computed using a fixed point iteration. The setup is identical to section C.1, where a single subflow is now either a residual block or a convolutional Sylvester flow transformation, with a leading actnorm layer [ Results are obtained by running models a single after random weight initialization. Additionally, the gated convolutions are replaced by denseblock layers.
Learning Load Balancing with GNN in MPTCP-Enabled Heterogeneous Networks
Ji, Han, Wu, Xiping, Zeng, Zhihong, Chen, Chen
Hybrid light fidelity (LiFi) and wireless fidelity (WiFi) networks are a promising paradigm of heterogeneous network (HetNet), attributed to the complementary physical properties of optical spectra and radio frequency. However, the current development of such HetNets is mostly bottlenecked by the existing transmission control protocol (TCP), which restricts the user equipment (UE) to connecting one access point (AP) at a time. While the ongoing investigation on multipath TCP (MPTCP) can bring significant benefits, it complicates the network topology of HetNets, making the existing load balancing (LB) learning models less effective. Driven by this, we propose a graph neural network (GNN)-based model to tackle the LB problem for MPTCP-enabled HetNets, which results in a partial mesh topology. Such a topology can be modeled as a graph, with the channel state information and data rate requirement embedded as node features, while the LB solutions are deemed as edge labels. Compared to the conventional deep neural network (DNN), the proposed GNN-based model exhibits two key strengths: i) it can better interpret a complex network topology; and ii) it can handle various numbers of APs and UEs with a single trained model. Simulation results show that against the traditional optimisation method, the proposed learning model can achieve near-optimal throughput within a gap of 11.5%, while reducing the inference time by 4 orders of magnitude. In contrast to the DNN model, the new method can improve the network throughput by up to 21.7%, at a similar inference time level.
A Survey on Congestion Control and Scheduling for Multipath TCP: Machine Learning vs Classical Approaches
Maliha, Maisha, Habibi, Golnaz, Atiquzzaman, Mohammed
Multipath TCP (MPTCP) has been widely used as an efficient way for communication in many applications. Data centers, smartphones, and network operators use MPTCP to balance the traffic in a network efficiently. MPTCP is an extension of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which provides multiple paths, leading to higher throughput and low latency. Although MPTCP has shown better performance than TCP in many applications, it has its own challenges. The network can become congested due to heavy traffic in the multiple paths (subflows) if the subflow rates are not determined correctly. Moreover, communication latency can occur if the packets are not scheduled correctly between the subflows. This paper reviews techniques to solve the above-mentioned problems based on two main approaches; non data-driven (classical) and data-driven (Machine Learning) approaches. This paper compares these two approaches and highlights their strengths and weaknesses with a view to motivating future researchers in this exciting area of machine learning for communications. This paper also provides details on the simulation of MPTCP and its implementations in real environments.
Fair and Efficient Distributed Edge Learning with Hybrid Multipath TCP
Pokhrel, Shiva Raj, Choi, Jinho, Walid, Anwar
The bottleneck of distributed edge learning (DEL) over wireless has shifted from computing to communication, primarily the aggregation-averaging (Agg-Avg) process of DEL. The existing transmission control protocol (TCP)-based data networking schemes for DEL are application-agnostic and fail to deliver adjustments according to application layer requirements. As a result, they introduce massive excess time and undesired issues such as unfairness and stragglers. Other prior mitigation solutions have significant limitations as they balance data flow rates from workers across paths but often incur imbalanced backlogs when the paths exhibit variance, causing stragglers. To facilitate a more productive DEL, we develop a hybrid multipath TCP (MPTCP) by combining model-based and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based MPTCP for DEL that strives to realize quicker iteration of DEL and better fairness (by ameliorating stragglers). Hybrid MPTCP essentially integrates two radical TCP developments: i) successful existing model-based MPTCP control strategies and ii) advanced emerging DRL-based techniques, and introduces a novel hybrid MPTCP data transport for easing the communication of the Agg-Avg process. Extensive emulation results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid MPTCP can overcome excess time consumption and ameliorate the application layer unfairness of DEL effectively without injecting additional inconstancy and stragglers.
Practical and Configurable Network Traffic Classification Using Probabilistic Machine Learning
Chen, Jiahui, Breen, Joe, Phillips, Jeff M., Van der Merwe, Jacobus
Network traffic classification that is widely applicable and highly accurate is valuable for many network security and management tasks. A flexible and easily configurable classification framework is ideal, as it can be customized for use in a wide variety of networks. In this paper, we propose a highly configurable and flexible machine learning traffic classification method that relies only on statistics of sequences of packets to distinguish known, or approved, traffic from unknown traffic. Our method is based on likelihood estimation, provides a measure of certainty for classification decisions, and can classify traffic at adjustable certainty levels. Our classification method can also be applied in different classification scenarios, each prioritizing a different classification goal. We demonstrate how our classification scheme and all its configurations perform well on real-world traffic from a high performance computing network environment.
Traffic Optimization for a Mixture of Self-Interested and Compliant Agents
Sharon, Guni (University of Texas at Austin) | Albert, Michael (Duke University) | Rambha, Tarun (Cornell University) | Boyles, Stephen (University of Texas at Austin) | Stone, Peter (University of Texas at Austin)
This paper focuses on two commonly used path assignment policies for agents traversing a congested network: self-interested routing, and system-optimum routing. In the self-interested routing policy each agent selects a path that optimizes its own utility, while in the system-optimum routing, agents are assigned paths with the goal of maximizing system performance. This paper considers a scenario where a centralized network manager wishes to optimize utilities over all agents, i.e., implement a system-optimum routing policy. In many real-life scenarios, however, the system manager is unable to influence the route assignment of all agents due to limited influence on route choice decisions. Motivated by such scenarios, a computationally tractable method is presented that computes the minimal amount of agents that the system manager needs to influence (compliant agents) in order to achieve system optimal performance. Moreover, this methodology can also determine whether a given set of compliant agents is sufficient to achieve system optimum and compute the optimal route assignment for the compliant agents to do so. Experimental results are presented showing that in several large-scale, realistic traffic networks optimal flow can be achieved with as low as 13% of the agent being compliant and up to 54%.
Quick guide to using advanced ensemble methods in SAS Enterprise Miner
Last month at SAS Global Forum 2016, I presented the paper, Ensemble Modeling: Recent Advances and Applications, that I wrote along with my colleagues yeliu and M_Maldonado. In this paper, we shared a SAS Enterprise Miner subflow that can be incorporated into your predictive modeling flow to implement the following ensemble methods that take model performance into account: top-t, hill-climbing, clustering-based selection, and stacking methods. After importing this XML file into your project, you can copy the entire flow into the diagram that has your predictive modeling flow, connect the flows together, and run. See the README file for instructions on how to import these XML files and quickly get started with these more sophisticated ensemble methods. Note there are several nodes that directly create ensemble models in SAS Enterprise Miner, and they've been covered in previous SAS Global Forum papers: See Leveraging Ensemble Models in SAS Enterprise Miner and The Power of the Group Processing Facility in SAS Enterprise Miner for more information.