Knowledge about future traffic in backbone optical networks may greatly improve a range of tasks that Communications Service Providers (CSPs) have to face. This work proposes a procedure for long-term traffic forecasting in optical networks. We formulate a long-terT traffic forecasting problem as an ordinal classification task. Due to the optical networks’ (and other network technologies’) characteristics, traffic forecasting has been realized by predicting future traffic levels rather than the exact traffic volume. We examine different machine learning (ML) algorithms and compare them with time series algorithms methods. To evaluate the developed ML models, we use a quality metric, which considers the network resource usage. Datasets used during research are based on real traffic patterns presented by Internet Exchange Point in Seattle. Our study shows that ML algorithms employed for long-term traffic forecasting problem obtain high values of quality metrics. Additionally, the final choice of the ML algorithm for the forecasting task should depend on CSPs expectations.

The problem that this paper investigates, namely, optimization of overlay computing systems, follows naturally from growing need for effective processing and consequently, fast development of various distributed systems. We consider an overlay-based computing system, i.e., a virtual computing system is deployed on the top of an existing physical network (e.g., Internet) providing connectivity between computing nodes. The main motivation behind the overlay concept is simple provision of network functionalities (e.g., diversity, flexibility, manageability) in a relatively cost-effective way as well as regardless of physical and logical structure of underlying networks. The workflow of tasks processed in the computing system assumes that there are many sources of input data and many destinations of output data, i.e., many-to-many transmissions are used in the system. The addressed optimization problem is formulatedin the form of an ILP (Integer Linear Programing) model. Since the model is computationally demanding and NP-complete, besides the branch-and-bound algorithm included in the CPLEX solver, we propose additional cut inequalities. Moreover, we present and test two effective heuristic algorithms: tabu search and greedy. Both methods yield satisfactory results close to optimal.

Comparison of Evolutionary Algorithm and Heuristics for Flow Optimization in P2P Systems Nowadays, many Internet users make use of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems to download electronic content including music, movies, software, etc. Growing popularity in P2P based protocol implementations for file sharing purposes caused that the P2P traffic exceeds Web traffic and in accordance with to many statistics, P2P systems produce a more than 50% of the whole Internet traffic. Therefore, P2P systems provide remarkable income for Internet Service Providers (ISP). However, at the same time P2P systems generates many problems related to traffic engineering, optimization, network congestion. In this paper we focus on the problem of flow optimization in P2P file sharing systems. Corresponding to BitTorrent-based systems behaviour, the optimization of P2P flows is very complex and in this work we consider different heuristic strategies for content distribution and moreover we propose a new evolutionary algorithm (EA) for this problem. We compare results of the algorithms against optimal results yielded by CPLEX solver for networks including 10 peers and relation to random algorithm for 100-node systems. According to numerical experiments, the EA provides solutions close to optimal for small instances and all of the heuristics exhibit a superior performance over random search.