PQROM: To optimize software defined network QoS-aware routing with proximal policy optimization

Currently, Quality-of-Service (QoS)-aware routing is one of the crucial challenges in Software Defined Network (SDN). The QoS performances, e.g. latency, packet loss ratio and throughput, must be optimized to improve the performance of network. Traditional static routing algorithms based on Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) could not adapt to traffic fluctuation, which may cause severe network congestion and service degradation. Central intelligence of SDN controller and recent breakthroughs of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) pose a promising solution to tackle this challenge. Thus, we propose an on-policy DRL mechanism, namely the PPO-based (Proximal Policy Optimization) QoS -aware Routing Optimization Mechanism (PQROM), to achieve a general and re-customizable routing optimization. PQROM can dynamically update the routing calculation by adjusting the reward function according to different optimization objectives, and it is independent of any specific network pattern. Additionally, as a black-box one-step optimization, PQROM is qualified for both continuous and discrete action space with high-dimensional input and output. The OMNeT ++ simulation experiment results show that PQROM not only has good convergence, but also has better stability compared with OSPF, less training time and simpler hyper-parameters adjustment than Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) and less hardware consumption than Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C).