Federated intelligence for active queue management in inter-domain congestion

Abstract

Active Queue Management (AQM) has been considered as a paradigm for the complicated network management task of mitigating congestion by controlling buffer of network link queues. However, finding the right parameters for an AQM scheme is very challenging due to the dynamics of the IP networks. In addition, this problem becomes even more complex in inter-domain scenarios where several organizations interconnect each other with the limitation of not sharing raw and private data. As a result, existing AQM schemes have not been widely employed despite their advantages. Therefore, we present a solution that tackles the challenges of tuning the AQM parameters for inter-domain congestion control scenarios where the network management goes beyond an organization's domain. We then introduce the Federated Intelligence for AQM (FIAQM) architecture, which enhances the existing AQM schemes by leveraging the Federated Learning approach. The proposed FIAQM framework is capable of dynamically adjusting the AQM parameters in a multi-domain setting, which is hard to achieve with the conventional AQM solutions working alone. To this end, FIAQM uses an artificial neural network, trained in a federated manner, to predict beyond-own-domain congestion and an intelligent AQM parameter tuner. The evaluation results show that FIAQM can effectively improve the performance of the inter-domain connections by reducing the congestion on their links while preserving the network data private within each participating domain.