Learning and Generating Distributed Routing Protocols Using Graph-Based Deep Learning

Automated network control and management has been a long standing target of network protocols. We address in this paper the question of automated protocol design, where distributed networked nodes have to cooperate to achieve a common goal without a priori knowledge on which information to exchange or the network topology. While reinforcement learning has often been proposed for this task, we propose here to apply recent methods from semi-supervised deep neural networks which are focused on graphs. Our main contribution is an approach for applying graph-based deep learning on distributed routing protocols via a novel neural network architecture named Graph-Query Neural Network. We apply our approach to the tasks of shortest path and max-min routing. We evaluate the learned protocols in cold-start and also in case of topology changes. Numerical results show that our approach is able to automatically develop efficient routing protocols for those two use-cases with accuracies larger than 95%. We also show that specific properties of network protocols, such as resilience to packet loss, can be explicitly included in the learned protocol.