A Dual-stage Attention Based SDN Traffic Prediction Method

Traffic matrix is the main research object of traffic prediction in software-defined networking. Accurate and timely traffic matrix prediction plays an important role in avoiding network congestion. While various methods have been proposed in previous studies to solve the SDN traffic prediction problem, few of them consider both inter- and intra-flow features. In this paper, we propose a dual-stage attention based Traffic Prediction method for the SDN traffic matrix prediction task. First, our method uses temporal pattern attention as the inter-flow attention mechanism before the encoding stage to realize adaptive feature extraction. Then, temporal attention is introduced as the intra-flow attention mechanism before the decoding stage to capture long-term temporal dependencies. Finally, we use the autoregressive module to handle the highly dynamic SDN traffic volume. Experimental results show that our proposed SDN traffic prediction method can capture more traffic features and improve the SDN traffic matrix prediction performance to some extent.