HPETC: History Priority Enhanced Tensor Completion for Network Distance Measurement

In network distance measurement, how to estimate the whole network distance data from partially observed samples has attracted lots of attention because of its significance for network performance evaluation. Matrix completion becomes the most effective approach. However, the two-dimension matrix can only capture the spatial features in the network distance data while ignoring the temporal features. To conquer the problem, few recent studies begin to model the network distance data as a three-dimension tensor and propose tensor completion approaches for distance estimation. Although promising, existing tensor completion approaches still suffer the problem of low recovery accuracy and high measurement cost because they ignore the history priority information. To fully utilize both spatial and temporal features hidden in the distance data, this paper formulates a novel History Priority Enhanced Tensor Completion (HPETC) for distance estimation as a weighted tensor nuclear norm minimization problem where the weight is defined based on the history subspaces information. To solve the weighted tensor nuclear norm minimization problem, we first transform it into a factorization-based Frobenius norm minimization problem to avoid costly T-SVD computations, and then propose an iterative algorithm to solve the transformed problem. We further derive a theoretical sampling bound that is lower than the existing sampling bound, thus leads a lower measurement cost. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by conducting extensive experiments using two real network distance datasets. The result shows that the proposed algorithm can not only improve the estimation accuracy but also reduce the sampling complexity compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

I. Introduction

Network distance is often defined as the communication latency between two nodes, in the form of round-trip-time (RTT). Many Internet applications can benefit from the knowledge of whole network end-to-end distance such as overlay routing [1], peer-to-peer file sharing [2], mobile edge computing [3], and content delivery network. For instance, in content delivery networks, the end-user can conveniently obtain its desired web resources from a well-selected web server with the smallest network distance [4].