Bound Inference and Reinforcement Learning-Based Path Construction in Bandwidth Tomography

Inferring the bandwidth of internal links from the bandwidth of end-to-end paths, so-termed bandwidth tomography, is a long-standing open problem in the network tomography literature. The difficulty is due to the fact that no existing mathematical tool is directly applicable to solve the inverse problem with a set of min-equations. We systematically tackle this challenge by designing a polynomial-time algorithm that returns the exact bandwidth value for all identifiable links and the tightest error bound for unidentifiable links for a given set of measurement paths. When the measurement paths are not given in advance, we prove the hardness of building measurement paths that can be used for deriving the global tightest error bounds for unidentifiable links. Accordingly, we develop a reinforcement learning (RL) approach for measurement path construction, that utilizes the special knowledge in bandwidth tomography and integrates both offline training and online prediction. Evaluation results with real-world ISP topology as well as simulated networks demonstrate that compared to other path construction methods, Random and Diversity Preferred, our RL-based path construction method can build measurement paths that result in a much smaller average error bound of the link bandwidth.