Efficient Data-Driven Network Functions

Cloud environments require dynamic and adaptive networking policies. It is preferred to use heuristics over advanced learning algorithms in Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) in production because of high-performance constraints. This paper proposes Aquarius to passively yet efficiently gather observations and enable the use of machine learning to collect, infer, and supply accurate networking state information - without incurring additional signaling and management overhead. This paper illustrates the use of Aquarius with a traffic classifier, an auto-scaling system, and a load balancer - and demonstrates the use of three different machine learning paradigms - unsupervised, supervised, and reinforcement learning, within Aquarius, for inferring network state. Testbed evaluations show that Aquarius increases network state visibility and brings notable performance gains with low overhead.