A Tensor Based Deep Learning Technique

for Intelligent Packet Routing

Bomin Mao∗ , Zubair Md. Fadlullah∗ , Fengxiao Tang∗ , Nei Kato∗ ,
Osamu Akashi† , Takeru Inoue† , and Kimihiro Mizutani†
∗ GraduateSchool of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
Email: {bomin.mao, zubair, fengxiao.tang, kato}@it.is.tohoku.ac.jp
† NTT Corporation, Yokosuka, Japan

Email: {akashi.osamu, inoue.takeru, mizutani.kimihiro}@lab.ntt.co.jp

Abstract—Recently, network operators are confronting the Existing Routing Paradigm Future Routing Paradigm
challenge of exploding traffic and more complex network environ-
Router typically uses fixed,
ments due to the increasing number of access terminals having Router needs to use many different parameters
a single metric
various requirements for delay and package loss rate. However, or a few metrics

traditional routing methods based on the maximum or minimum
single metric value aim at improving the network quality of
only one aspect, which makes them become incapable to deal
with the increasingly complicated network traffic. Considering
the improvement of deep learning techniques in recent years,
in this paper, we propose a smart packet routing strategy with
Tensor-based Deep Belief Architectures (TDBAs) that considers
multiple parameters of network traffic. For better modeling the
data in TDBAs, we use the tensors to represent the units in every
layer as well as the weights and biases. The proposed TDBAs
can be trained to predict the whole paths for every edge router.
Simulation results demonstrate that our proposal outperforms
the conventional Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol in
terms of overall packet loss rate and average delay per hop.
I. I NTRODUCTION
In recent years, the network traffic is increasing tremen-
dously. The global Internet Protocol (IP) traffic per annum
exceeded the ZettaByte (ZB) threshold at the end of 2016,
and is expected to increase up to 2.3 ZB by 2020. At the same
time, the number of devices connected to the IP networks will
be three times as high as the global population in 2020 [1].
The packets sent by the devices have different requirements for
the Quality of Service (QoS) [2] since these devices belong
to heterogeneous networks. Thus, it becomes increasingly
complicated to control the network traffic when designing the
routing strategy. As shown in Fig. 1, conventional routing
protocols based on the maximum or minimum metric value
focus on fixed metrics, which cannot cope with the complex
traffic environment. In order to control the network traffic
in an effective manner, it is necessary to consider multiple
parameters and intelligently choose the routing paths [3]–[5].
Moreover, the multi-core platforms have received significant
improvement in the computing capacity, enabling routers to
undertake much more complex computation [6].
Recently, deep learning, a new breed of machine learning
technique, has been widely applied in various fields, such as
image classification [7], pattern recognition [8], and natural
language processing [9]. This technique can be utilized to
effectively analyze the complex relationships among multiple
Number of Hardware Reach-
packets status ability
Link Distance
state vector Packet Protocols Link
types policies delay
Static/dynamic routing paths Intelligent packet routing paths
Fig. 1: The future routing strategy needs to consider multiple
parameters for traffic control.
inputs through training with example data. The trained deep
learning architecture can predict the values of some parameters
when we input the necessary information. Since the deep learn-
ing technique has exhibited superior performance in extremely
difficult applications which have traditionally been dominated
by humans, e.g. board games, it may also have interesting
applications for network traffic control. Kato et al. [3]–[5]
adopted deep learning to predict the routing paths.
If we want to utilize deep learning techniques to relate the
routing paths and multiple network parameters, it is critically
important to choose a suitable mathematical model to represent
the parameters. The tensor, which can be seen as a multi-
dimensional matrix, provides a very concise mathematical
framework to arrange the values of various parameters [10],
leading to its wide application in physics and engineering.
While the works in [2] and [10] used the tensor to perform
QoS-specific packet transmission, to the best of our knowl-
edge, no prior work investigated how to use the tensor for
intelligent packet routing.
In this vein, we aim to combine the tensor and deep learning
technique. We propose a Tensor-based Deep Belief Architec-
ture (TDBA), which utilizes the tensor to model the values
of every layer, weights and biases. Considering the tensor
containing multi-dimensional information, we use the numbers
of inbound packets of all edge routers and the corresponding
time, source and destination, and remaining buffer size to form
a five-dimensional array as the input tensor. We adopt a vector,
which can be seen as a 1-dimensional tensor as the output,
to denote the next node. The tensors representing the hidden

978-1-5090-5019-2/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE

 2.0 … 2.9
1.6 … 2.0
1.7 … 2.5 …
…
1.3 1.8 …
5 Usually, we use vectors to represent the values of units in
… 1.2 … 2.0 …
500B 1.0 … 1.3 …
hop number
ho
1 … 6 …
Fig. 2: An example of a three-order tensor.
layers, weights, and biases can be decided through training.
In our considered network, the packets are supposed to be
generated in and destined for edge routers while the inner
routers just forward packets. Every edge router obtains the
traffic patterns of the other edge routers through signaling
process. Then, the edge routers input the traffic patterns to
the TDBA and construct the paths to all other edge routers.
The whole paths are attached to the headers of corresponding
packets. Consequently, other routers just forward the packets
according to the labeled paths.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. The
preliminaries on the tensor and deep learning are provided in
Sec. II. Sec. III presents our proposed TDBA and how to utilize
it for network routing. In Sec. IV, we analyze the performance
of our proposal. The paper is concluded in Sec. V.
II. P RELIMINARIES
In this section, we will give some preliminaries about the
tensor model for routing and the tensor calculations for deep
learning.
A. Tensor Model for Routing
A tensor is an organized multi-dimensional matrix which
can represent the data in large-scale forms. The order or rank of
a tensor is the dimensionality of the matrix needed to represent
it. Traditional scalars and vectors can be considered as 0-
dimensional and 1-dimensional tensors, respectively. We can
define 𝑋 ∈ 𝑅𝐼1 ×𝐼2 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐼𝑁 as an N-order tensor and the size
of the 𝑗 𝑡ℎ dimension is 𝐼𝑗 (𝑗 = 1 . . . 𝑁 ). Every dimension
of the tensor 𝑋 can represent a metric or a parameter. Then
the value of 𝑥𝑗1 𝑗2 ⋅⋅⋅𝑗𝑁 can denote another parameter’s value
under various conditions. For example, in Fig. 2, a three-
order tensor is depicted. The three dimensions represent the
hop number, packet size, and destination, respectively. The
elements’ values in the tensor denote the delay of a router
for sending packets of different sizes to various destination
routers via paths having different hops. We can find that the
value of 𝑥5,500,6 is 1.8, meaning that the transmission delay
of the 500B packet destined for router 5 via the 6-hop path is
1.8 seconds. From the example, it can be easily found that the
tensor is an efficient tool to represent the values of network
parameters of a large scale network.
B. Tensor-Based Deep Learning Model
As depicted in Fig. 3a, the deep learning architecture con-
sists of an input layer, several hidden layers, and an output
… layer. The units in every two adjacent layers are connected
… through weighted links while there is no inter-layer link. It
… should be noted that a bias unit which is omitted in the figure
is added to every unit in all layers except the input layer.
each layer, and a 2-dimensional matrix to represent the weight
and bias values of the links between two layers. If the input
comprises multi-dimensional data, we can use the tensor to
represent the values of units in each layer as well as the weights
and biases. Here, we define an operation of tensors to describe
the relationship between every two layers in the tensor-based
deep learning architecture [11].
Definition 1: Multi-dot Product (⊙). Suppose there are
three high-order tensors: 𝑋, 𝑍, and 𝑊 , and assume thatïijŽ
𝑋 ∈ 𝑅𝐼1 ×𝐼2 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐼𝑁 , 𝑍 ∈ 𝑅𝐽1 ×𝐽2 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐽𝑁 , and 𝑊 ∈
𝑅𝛼×𝐽1 ×𝐽2 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐽𝑁 (𝛼 = 𝐼1 × 𝐼2 × ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ × 𝐼𝑁 ). Assume that 𝑊
consists of 𝛼 sub-tensors of 𝑁 orders. The multi-dot result of
𝑋 and 𝑊 is 𝑍, and they satisfy the following equation,
𝑍 = 𝑋 ⊙ 𝑊, ∀𝑧𝑗1 𝑗2 ⋅⋅⋅𝑗𝑁 ∈ 𝑍, 𝑧𝑗1 𝑗2 ⋅⋅⋅𝑗𝑁 = 𝑋 ∙ 𝑊𝛾 (1)
∑𝑁 −1 ∏𝑁
where 𝛾 = 𝑗𝛾 + 𝑖=1 (𝑗𝑖 − 1) 𝑟=𝑖+1 𝐽𝑟 .
Except for the product operation, another difference of the
tensor-based deep learning architecture from the traditional
architecture is the method to calculate the training errors. As
we know, the training error is defined by the distance between
the practical output and the desired output. For two 𝑁 -order
tensors: 𝑋 ∈ 𝑅𝐼1 ×𝐼2 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐼𝑁 and 𝑌 ∈ 𝑅𝐼1 ×𝐼2 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐼𝑁 , their
distance is calculated as follows.

𝐼1 ×𝐼2 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐼𝑁
 ∑
𝑑𝑇 𝐷 = ⎷ 𝑔𝑖𝑗 (𝑥𝑖 − 𝑦𝑖 )(𝑥𝑗 − 𝑦𝑗 )
𝑖,𝑗=1 (2)
√
= (𝑋 − 𝑌 )𝑇 𝐺(𝑋 − 𝑌 ),
where 𝐺 is the metric matrix used to reflect the intrinsic
relationships between different coordinates for a high-order
data. Its element, 𝑔𝑖𝑗 , is typically defined as:
1 ∥𝑝𝑖 − 𝑝𝑗 ∥2
2
𝑔𝑖𝑗 = 𝑒𝑥𝑝{− }, (3)
2𝜋𝛿 2 2𝛿 2
2
where ∥𝑝𝑖 − 𝑝𝑗 ∥2 is the distance between 𝑥𝑖1 𝑖2 ⋅⋅⋅𝑖𝑁 (𝑥𝑖 ) and
𝑦𝑗1 𝑗2 ⋅⋅⋅𝑗𝑁 (𝑦𝑗 ), and it can be calculated as follows.
2
∥𝑝𝑖 − 𝑝𝑗 ∥2 =
√ (4)
(𝑖1 − 𝑗1 ) + (𝑖2 − 𝑗2 ) + ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ + (𝑖𝑁 − 𝑗𝑁 )2
2 2
III. T ENSOR -BASED D EEP L EARNING ROUTING
S TRATEGY
After introducing the basic knowledge on the tensor and
multi-dot operation, we design the tensor-based deep learning
model for routing. For clarity, this section is separated into
four parts: the input and output design, the forward propagation
process, the backward propagation process, and the procedures
of utilizing the structure for routing.
 Tensor of Bottom Layer Layer l-1
traffic patterns
‫ܫ‬௦௥
‫ܫ‬ௗ௥
‫ܫ‬௥
…
‫ܫ‬௧௜௠
‫ܫ‬௕௦
‫ݓ‬௝௜௟
unit i
Hidden Layers
(a) The considered TDBA.
Fig. 3: The consider tensor-based deep learning model.
A. Envisioned Input and Output Design
For better network traffic control, we choose the traffic
pattern as the input of the deep learning architecture since
it is the direct sign of the traffic situation. We utilize the
number of inbound packets of every router as its traffic pattern.
Therefore, the time should be divided into many slots and
every time slot is assumed to be Δ𝑡 seconds. The number of
inbound packets in the past 𝛽 time slots is adopted. To utilize
the traffic pattern more effectively, we also record the source
and destination nodes for every packet. Additionally, at the
end of each time slot, every router also needs to record the
size of its remaining buffer. With these information, we can
build a five-order tensor, 𝑋 ∈ 𝑅𝐼𝑟 ×𝐼𝑠𝑟 ×𝐼𝑑𝑟 ×𝐼𝑡𝑖𝑚 ×𝐼𝑏𝑠 , shown
in Fig. 3a, to describe the traffic pattern of the network. The
tensor orders, 𝐼𝑟 , 𝐼𝑠𝑟 , 𝐼𝑑𝑟 , 𝐼𝑡𝑖𝑚 , and 𝐼𝑏𝑠 denote the router,
the source router, the destination router, the time, and the
remaining buffer size, respectively. For the considered network,
the value of 𝐼𝑟 depends on the number of routers, traffic
patterns of which are utilized. The values of 𝐼𝑠𝑟 and 𝐼𝑑𝑟 depend
on the number of routers generating and receiving packets
since some routers in the considered backbone network just
play the role of forwarding packets. The value of 𝐼𝑡𝑖𝑚 is
equal to 𝛽, which is decided during the training process of
the TDBA.
After designing the input, the next step is to design the
output tensor for routing. First, we assume that only a single
path exists for every source-destination pair. If the output layer
represents one whole path or several whole paths, the error
rate will be high as any error in the output layer means that at
least one path is wrong. Therefore, in our envisioned design,
the output comprises only the next node that can be denoted by
a vector. The number of the elements in the vector is the same
as the network scale and all elements are binary. In the vector,
only one element has the value of 1 and its order represents
which router is the next node. Fig. 3a gives an example the
output layer, and the second element having the value of 1
means that router 2 is the next node. Additionally, the vector
can also be seen as a 1-dimensional tensor.
Layer l Top Layer Output
vector
Unit j in the hidden layer, ℎ
(0
… … hidden layer
1 ...
bias unit
…
unit j
0
… … visible layer
Unit i in the visible layer,
0)
(b) The architecture of Restricted
Boltzmann Machine.
B. Forward Propagation Process
After designing the input and output layers, we now need
to choose the deep learning architecture. In our proposal, we
utilize the Deep Belief Architecture (DBA) which is the most
common and effective among all deep learning models [3].
Since the units in the DBA are modeled as tensors, it is
referred to as the TDBA in the remainder of the paper.
As we know, every DBA is composed of several Restricted
Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) and each RBM consists of a
visible layer and a hidden layer denoted by 𝑉 ∈ 𝑅𝐼1 ×𝐼2 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐼𝑁
and 𝐻 ∈ 𝑅𝐽1 ×𝐽2 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐽𝑁 , respectively. The training of the
TDBA consists of two steps: the Greedy Layer-Wise training
to initialize the structure and the backpropagation step to fine-
tune the structure [12]. For the TDBA, the Greedy Layer-Wise
training is to train RBMs one by one in a bottom-up fashion.
As the RBM is an undirected graph model where the units in
the visible layer are connected to stochastic hidden units using
symmetrically weighted connections in Fig. 3b, the training
process of the RBM is unsupervised. This implies that sets of
unlabeled data are given to the visible layer. Then, the values of
the weights and biases are repeatedly adjusted until the hidden
layer can reconstruct the visible layer as exactly as possible.
To measure the reconstruction error, a log-likelihood function
of the visible layer is utilized as follows.
𝑚
∑
𝑙(𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴) = log 𝑝(𝑉 (𝑡) ), (5)
𝑡=1
where 𝑊 ∈ 𝑅𝛼×𝐽1 ×𝐽2 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐽𝑁 (𝛼 = 𝐼1 × 𝐼2 × ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ × 𝐼𝑁 ),
𝐵 ∈ 𝑅𝐽1 ×𝐽2 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐽𝑁 , and 𝐴 ∈ 𝑅𝐼1 ×𝐼2 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐼𝑁 denote the tensor
of weights, biases of the hidden layer, and biases of the visible
layer, respectively. 𝑚 denotes the number of training data. 𝑉 (𝑡)
is the 𝑡𝑡ℎ training data, the probability of which is 𝑝(𝑉 (𝑡) ).
To maximize 𝑙(𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴), the gradient descent of 𝑙(𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴)
is used to adjust the values of 𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴, which can be expressed
as follows.
∂𝑙(𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴)
𝜃 := 𝜃 + 𝜂1 , (6)
∂𝜃
where 𝜃 represents any element in the tensors 𝑊, 𝐵, and 𝐴.
𝜂1 denotes the learning rate in the first step.
 The value of ∂𝑙(𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴)/∂𝜃 can be obtained through
the Contrastive Divergence (CD) method and the Gibbs
Sampling method [13]. The cores of ∂𝑙(𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴)/∂𝑤𝑗𝑖 ,
∂𝑙(𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴)/∂𝑏𝑗 , and ∂𝑙(𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴)/∂𝑎𝑖 are given below (𝑖 =
𝑖1 𝑖2 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ 𝑖𝑛 , 𝑗 = 𝑗1 𝑗2 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ 𝑗𝑛 ).
C. Backpropagation Process
Since the RBMs except the final one are unsupervised
trained in the first step, the values of the weights and biases
are not optimum. Thus, we still need to fine-tune the whole
architecture. The goal of training is that the output of the
′

∂𝑙(𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴) 1∑
𝑙 deep learning architecture denoted by 𝑌 is the same as 𝑌
𝑝(ℎ𝑗 = 1∣𝑉 𝑘 )𝑣𝑖𝑘 ,
′
= 𝑣𝑖 𝑝(ℎ𝑗 = 1∣𝑉 ) − when we input 𝑋 to the DBA. For calculating 𝑌 , we run
∂𝑤𝑗𝑖 𝑙
𝑘=1 a forward propagation after inputting 𝑋 with the initialized
(7) values of the weights and biases. In the forward propagation
process, the units in each layer are weighted and then they
𝑙
1∑
𝑙 𝑙 𝑙
∂𝑙(𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴) get activated in the next layer. We use 𝑍 𝑙 ∈ 𝑅𝐼1 ×𝐼2 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐼𝑁
= 𝑝(ℎ𝑗 = 1∣𝑉 ) − 𝑝(ℎ𝑗 = 1∣𝑉 𝑘 ), (8) 𝑙 𝑙 𝑙
∂𝑏𝑗 𝑙 and 𝑈 𝑙 ∈ 𝑅𝐼1 ×𝐼2 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐼𝑁 to represent the weighted value and
𝑘=1
the activated value of the units in the 𝑙𝑡ℎ layer, respectively.
𝑙 The order of the tensor representing the 𝑙𝑡ℎ layer is 𝐼1𝑙 × 𝐼2𝑙 ×
∂𝑙(𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴) 1∑ 𝑘 𝑙
= 𝑣𝑖 − 𝑣𝑖 . (9) ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ × 𝐼𝑁 . If we assume that the TDBA consists of 𝐿 layers,
∂𝑎𝑖 𝑙 then for the input layer and the output layer, 𝑍 1 = 𝑋 and
𝑘=1
′

where 𝑙 is the number of sampling. 𝑉 𝑘 is the value after 𝑘-
times sampling.
As the value of every unit in one layer is independent on the
other units in the same layer when the other layers are fixed,
the conditional distribution probabilities of each layer while the
other layer is given, 𝑝(𝑉 ∣𝐻; 𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴) and 𝑝(𝐻∣𝑉 ; 𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴),
can be calculated as follows,
𝑌 = 𝑈 𝐿 . Since the input layer does not need to be activated,
𝑈 1 = 𝑍 1 . For the weight values of the links connecting to
𝑙−1 𝑙 𝑙 𝑙
the 𝑙𝑡ℎ layer, we use the tensor 𝑊 𝑙 ∈ 𝑅𝛼 ×𝐼1 ×𝐼2 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐼𝑁
(𝛼𝑙−1 = 𝐼1𝑙−1 × 𝐼2𝑙−1 × ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ × 𝐼𝑁 𝑙−1
). Then, we can utilize
the initialized weights and biases to calculate the weighted
values and the activated values of every layer according to the
following equations,

𝐼1 ×𝐼2∏
×⋅⋅⋅×𝐼𝑁 𝑍 𝑙 = 𝑊 𝑙 ⊙ 𝑈 𝑙−1 + 𝐵 𝑙 , (14)
𝑝(𝑉 ∣𝐻; 𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴) = 𝑝(𝑣𝑖 ∣𝐻; 𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴), (10)
𝑖
𝑈 𝑙 = 𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑚(𝑍 𝑙 ), (15)
𝐽1 ×𝐽2∏
×⋅⋅⋅×𝐽𝑁
𝐼1𝑙 ×𝐼2𝑙 ×⋅⋅⋅×𝐼𝑁
𝑙
𝑝(𝐻∣𝑉 ; 𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴) = 𝑝(ℎ𝑗 ∣𝑉 ; 𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴). (11) where 𝐵 𝑙 ∈ 𝑅 denotes the biases of the 𝑙𝑡ℎ layer.
𝑗 After the forward propagation process, the output of the
′
If the values of the units in the visible layer and the hidden TDBA, 𝑌 (𝑈 𝐿 ), can be obtained. To measure the difference
′
layer are all binary, then 𝑝(𝑣𝑖 = 1∣𝐻; 𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴) and 𝑝(ℎ𝑗 = between 𝑌 and 𝑌 , we need to define a loss function as
1∣𝑉 ; 𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴) are expressed as, follows,
𝑚
1 ∑ ′ (𝑡) ′
𝐽1 ×𝐽2∑
×⋅⋅⋅×𝐽𝑁 𝐽= (𝑌 − 𝑌 (𝑡) )𝑇 𝐺(𝑌 (𝑡) − 𝑌 (𝑡) )+
2𝑚 𝑡=1
𝑝(𝑣𝑖 = 1∣𝐻; 𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴) = 𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑚( 𝑤𝑗𝑖 ℎ𝑗 + 𝑎𝑖 ),
𝑙 𝑙
𝐿 𝐼1 ×𝐼2∑
𝑙
×⋅⋅⋅×𝐼𝑁 𝛼 𝑙−1 (16)
𝑗
1 ∑ ∑
(12) 𝑤𝑗2𝑙 𝑖𝑙−1
2𝜆
𝑙=2 𝑗 𝑙 =1 𝑖𝑙−1 =1
𝐼1 ×𝐼2∑
×⋅⋅⋅×𝐼𝑁
𝑝(ℎ𝑗 = 1∣𝑉 ; 𝑊, 𝐵, 𝐴) = 𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑚( 𝑤𝑗𝑖 𝑣𝑖 + 𝑏𝑗 ). The first term on the right side of Eq. 16 is an average sum-
𝑖
of-squares error term. The second term is called a weight decay
(13) term used for decreasing the magnitude of the weights and
helping to prevent overfitting. 𝜆 is the weight decay parameter.
where 𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑚 represents the sigmoid activation function, i.e.,
For minimizing the value of 𝐽 in the backpropagation process,
𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑚(𝑥) = 1+𝑒1−𝑥 .
we use the gradient descent of 𝐽 to update 𝑊 and 𝐵 as shown
By repetitively updating the values of the weights and
in the equations below,
biases, we can finally train the RBM, and then use the activated
output of the hidden layer as the visible layer of the next RBM.
After training the RBMs, the TDBA can get well initialized. ∂𝐽
𝑤𝑗𝑙 𝑙 𝑖𝑙−1 := 𝑤𝑗𝑙 𝑙 𝑖𝑙−1 − 𝜂2 , (17)
Here, it should be noted that the training data in our proposal ∂𝑤𝑗𝑙 𝑙 𝑖𝑙−1
is labeled, which means that for every example of the traffic
pattern, 𝑋, there is a corresponding output 𝑌 . For training ∂𝐽
the final RBM with the labeled data, we usually take the third 𝑏𝑙𝑖𝑙 := 𝑏𝑙𝑖𝑙 − 𝜂2 , (18)
∂𝑏𝑙𝑖𝑙
layer up-bottom and the top layer, 𝑌 , as the visible layer of
the final RBM. where 𝜂2 denotes the learning rate.
 After updating the values of weights and biases, we run
the forward propagation again and check whether the value
of 𝐽 satisfies the upper limit. If not, the update and forward
propagation process need to be repetitively run until the value
of 𝐽 is not above the upper limit or the number of loops reaches
a definite value.
D. The Procedures of the Proposed Tensor-Based Deep Learn-
ing Routing Model
Algorithm 1: The procedures of the tensor-based deep
learning routing model
Input: number of routers 𝑁 , number of edge routers 𝐸,
training data (traffic pattern of edge routers, next router)
1: for each router 𝑖 ∈ 𝑁 do
2: for each router 𝑗 ∈ 𝐸 do
3: Train the TDBA[𝑖][𝑗] with corresponding training
data according to Eqs. 5 to 18
4: end for
5: Send the weight and bias values to the edge routers
6: end for
7: for each edge router 𝑗 ∈ 𝐸 do
8: Record the traffic pattern 𝑇 𝑃 [𝑗] and send it to other
edge routers
9: Execute Forward Propagation Process using Eqs. 14
and 15, output the next nodes
10: Using the next node information, construct the paths
to destination routers
11: end for
12: return the paths to destination routers
In this part, we explain how the proposed tensor-based deep
learning routing strategy works for our considered network
consisting of edge routers and inner routers. In the considered
network, only the edge routers offer the access service for the
terminals while the inner routers just forward packets for edge
routers. Then, we can suppose that the packets are all generated
in and destined for edge routers.
The procedures of the proposed model are presented in
Alg. 1. It needs to be mentioned that the training data can be
obtained through available network data traces, e.g. the Center
for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) [14], or from
a similar network topology. The data consist of the detailed
traffic patterns of all edge routers and the corresponding paths
connecting any two edge routers. Then every router uses the
traffic patterns and the corresponding next nodes information
for all edge routers to train its TDBAs and then sends the
values of weights and biases to all the edge routers as shown in
Steps 1 to 6. Next, every edge router records its traffic pattern
and share it with the other edge routers. With the information,
every edge router can utilize the TDBAs to construct the paths
to other edge routers as shown in Steps 7 to 11. Then, the paths
can be labeled to the headers of packets and other routers send
the packets according to the paths.
IV. P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION
In this section, we evaluate the effectiveness of our TDBA-
based routing strategy in terms of network performance. In
our simulations based on C++, because of all computations
conducted on a workstation, we choose a medium sized, 4 × 4
wired grid network, as our considered network. The sizes of
the data packets and signaling packets are both set to 1 Kb.
The link capacity is set to 400 Kbps and the total buffer size
of every router is assumed to be 400 Kb. The time slot is set
to 0.25 second.
After setting these parameters, first, we use the OSPF proto-
col as the routing strategy to simulate the packets transmission
process to record some data for training the TDBAs. As
the packets are all generated in the edge routers, we utilize
the traffic patterns of only edge routers as the input. The
traffic pattern of only one-time slot is enough for offering
high accuracy and more time slots mean much more complex
deep learning structures. Also, since the source and destination
information have no relation with the remaining buffer size, we
can construct a 3-dimensional tensor representing the traffic
patterns of edge routers as the input. The three dimensions
of the tensor denote the router order, source node, and the
destination node, respectively. Besides the traffic patterns of
edge routers, we add a separate unit for every edge router rep-
resenting its remaining buffer size in the time slot. Therefore,
the input layer has 1740 units while the output layer has 16
units. We have tried different TDBA structures and found that
the accuracy rate of the TDBA consisting of 5 layers and 20
units in each hidden layer reaches above 95%. Therefore, we
choose this structure in our proposal. After training the TDBAs
in each router with data from OSPF, we can finally get their
weights and biases.
Before analyzing the network performance of the TDBA-
based routing strategy, we make a comparison between the
proposed TDBA and the DBA utilized in our previous work [3]
as shown in Table I. Compared with previous work, in this
paper, the input of every TDBA contains more information,
leading to more units in the input layer. Moreover, the value of
the average Mean Square Error (MSE) for the TDBA is much
lower than that for DBA meaning that the prediction accuracy
has been improved a lot due to more input information.
For more clearly demonstrating the effectiveness of the
TDBA-based routing strategy, we compare the network perfor-
mance in terms of overall packet loss rate and average delay
per hop under different traffic loads as shown in Figs. 4 and 5.
TABLE I: Comparison of TDBA and DBA
Aspects TDBA DBA
#inbound packets,
Input Information #inbound packets source, destination,
remaining buffer size
#units in the
1740 16
input layer
Average MSE ≈ 10−4 ≈ 10−2
 16
OSPF
14 TDBA
Packet Loss Rate (%)
12
10
8
6 0.35
4 0.3
2 0.25
0 0.2
1.2 1.8 2.4 3 3.6
Packet Generating Rate (Mbps)
Fig. 4: Comparison of overall packet loss rate for the conven-
tional OSPF and the proposed TDBA system.
In Fig. 4, it can be noticed that when the packet generating rate
is limited within 2 Mbps, the performance in terms of packet
loss rate is the same for OSPF and TDBA, demonstrating that
the training of TDBA enables it to choose the same paths as
OSPF. The packet loss rate is nearly zero, which means that the
traffic congestion does not happen at this point. However, when
the packet generating rate exceeds 2.4 Mbps, the performance
of the two systems becomes different and their gap increases
with the increasing network traffic load. In Fig. 4, for OSPF,
the packet loss rate goes up quickly which means that the
traffic congestion happens and becomes more severe with the
rise of packet generating rate. On the other hand, no traffic
congestion happens for TDBA as it suffers from no packet loss
rate. This can be also demonstrated in Fig. 5 as the average
delay per hop of TDBA keeps unchanged during the whole
period while that of OSPF firstly surges and then grows slowly.
Note that the average delay per hop of OSPF nearly reaches
the theoretical maximum delay for the assumed scenario due to
the limited buffer size, which will also happen to that of TDBA
if the packet generating rate continues to grow and exceeds a
certain level. Here, it can be concluded that the TDBA based
routing strategy outperforms OSPF since the former can much
better control the network traffic.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we proposed a deep learning architecture
based on the tensor model to predict the traffic paths by using
only traffic patterns. Since a tensor can represent a much
higher-dimensional data compared with vectors or scalars, our
proposal in the paper considers multiple networking parame-
ters instead of only one parameter like conventional routing
protocols. In our proposal, the TDBA utilizes only the edge
routers’ traffic patterns with various conditions considered
to predict the whole paths to other routers while the inner
routers do not need to send their traffic pattern information
to the edge routers. Since our proposal has a lower signaling
overhead than OSPF, our proposal outperforms OSPF in terms
of packet loss rate and average delay per hop when the network
experiences a high traffic load. As an increasing number of
terminals are accessing networks for various kinds of services,
our future direction will be to apply the tensor-based deep
learning architecture for routing to meet the QoS requirements
of different services. In that case, we need to consider more
0.55
OSPF
Average Delay per Hop (s)
TDBA
0.5
0.45
0.4
1.2 1.8 2.4 3 3.6
Packet Generating Rate (Mbps)
Fig. 5: Comparison of average delay per hop for the conven-
tional OSPF and the proposed TDBA system.
parameters, e.g. the packet size and the service time, which
leads to the tensor model having more dimensions.
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