Deep learning based adaptive sequential data augmentation technique for the optical network traffic synthesis.

The lack of the sufficient and diverse training data is one of the main challenges limiting performances of the machine learning enabled applications in optical networks. Here, we propose a deep learning based sequential data augmentation technique for the aggregate traffic data augmentation for diverse optical network scenarios. A generative adversarial network (GAN) model is trained with the experimental traffic data to automatically extract the substantial characteristics of the experimental traffic data through the zero-sum game theory and then augment the traffic data adaptively. The statistical evaluation parameters of the augmented traffic are mean, variance and Hurst exponent. To add comparisons, two other classical generative models including the statistical parameter configuration (SPC) model and the variational autoencoder (VAE) model are also adopted to generate the traffic data that are similar to the actual traffic data. The comprehensive comparisons among the proposed GAN, the SPC and VAE show that the performances of the GAN exceed those of the SPC and the VAE obviously. The mean and the variance of the augmented traffic data from the GAN are almost equal to those of the experimental traffic data, where the average deviations are both within 2%. The Hurst exponent of the augmented traffic data from the GAN is respectively near 90% and 96% of those of the experimental traffic data in the access network and the core network. To estimate the similarity intuitively, the well-known k-mean algorithm is used to cluster the augmented traffic data according to the centroids determined by the corresponding experimental traffic data and the clustering accuracies are all higher than 95% for 6 kinds of typical traffic types in the optical networks. These results demonstrate that the proposed GAN is able to effectively generate the traffic data that is very close to the experimental traffic data and is difficult to be distinguished for diverse traffic types. Moreover, a relatively small dataset with a few hundred pieces of experimental traffic data is required and the amount of the augmented traffic data from the GAN is unlimited in theory, which can be augmented as much as we need. The proposed traffic data augmentation technique also has the potential to be utilized in other sequential data augmentation applications for the optical networks.