Intelligent Deflection Routing in Buffer-Less Networks

Abstract—Deflection routing is employed to ameliorate packet loss caused by contention in buffer-less architectures such as op-tical burst-switched (OBS) networks. The main goal of deflection routing is to successfully deflect a packet based only on a limited knowledge that network nodes possess about their environment. In this paper, we present a framework that introduces intelli-gence to deflection routing (iDef). iDef decouples the design of the signaling infrastructure from the underlying learning algorithm. It consists of a signaling and a decision-making module. Signaling module implements a feedback management protocol while the decision-making module implements a reinforcement learning algorithm. We also propose several learning-based deflection routing protocols, implement them in iDef using the ns-3 network simulator, and compare their performance. Index Terms—Associative learning, buffer-less networks, decision-making, deflection routing, reinforcement learning. I