Energy-Efficient Deep Reinforced Traffic Grooming in Elastic Optical Networks for Cloud-Fog Computing

Cloud-fog computing emerges to satisfy the low latency and high computation requirements of Internet of Things (IoT) services. Elastic optical networks (EONs) are excellent substrate communication networks between fog datacenters and cloud datacenters. However, the uneven traffic of massive cloud-fog services incurs many spectrum fragments, leading to high extra energy consumption. To solve this problem, we propose an energy-efficient deep reinforced traffic grooming (EDTG) algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning. Unlike existing manually network features extracting methods, we convert the traditional network modal and the service routing path into colored network images to represent their states and extract the features automatically by MobilenetV3 according to these images. With the extracted features, we implement an advantage actor-critic (A2C) algorithm, whose actor module and critic module share an artificial neural network (ANN) to get optimal grooming actions. Additionally, after repeated attempts and experiments, we set up an objective reward and punishment mechanism to evaluate the grooming actions. We conduct extensive simulations for performance evaluation, and the results have shown that EDTG can significantly reduce energy consumption compared with two well-performed traffic grooming algorithms.