학술논문

Network Calculus With Flow Prolongation – A Feedforward FIFO Analysis Enabled by ML
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Computers IEEE Trans. Comput. Computers, IEEE Transactions on. 72(1):97-110 Jan, 2023
Subject
Computing and Processing
Delays
Feedforward systems
Calculus
Analytical models
Computational modeling
Servers
Real-time systems
Network calculus
machine learning
graph neural networks
FIFO analysis
flow prolongation
Language
ISSN
0018-9340
1557-9956
2326-3814
Abstract
The derivation of upper bounds on data flows’ worst-case traversal times is an important task in many application areas. For accurate bounds, model simplifications should be avoided even in large networks. Network Calculus (NC) provides a modeling framework and different analyses for delay bounding. We investigate the analysis of feedforward networks where all queues implement First-In First-Out (FIFO) service. Correctly considering the effect of data flows onto each other under FIFO is already a challenging task. Yet, the fastest available NC FIFO analysis (called LUDB) suffers from limitations resulting in unnecessarily loose bounds. A feature called Flow Prolongation (FP) has been shown to improve delay bound accuracy significantly. Unfortunately, FP needs to be executed within this NC FIFO analysis very often and each time it creates an exponentially growing set of alternative networks with prolongations. FP therefore does not scale and has been out of reach for the exhaustive analysis of large networks. We introduce DeepFP, an approach to make FP scale by predicting prolongations using machine learning. In our evaluation, we show that DeepFP can improve results in FIFO networks considerably. Compared to the aforementioned LUDB analysis, DeepFP reduces delay bounds by $12.1 \;\%$12.1% on average at negligible additional computational cost.