Encoder-Decoder Networks for Cloud Resource Consumption Forecasting

Sammanfattning: Excessive resource allocation in telecommunications networks can be prevented by forecasting the resource demand when dimensioning the networks and then allocating the necessary resources accordingly, which is an ongoing effort to achieve a more sustainable development. In this work, traffic data from cloud environments that host deployed virtualized network functions (VNFs) of an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) has been collected along with the computational resource consumption of the VNFs. A supervised learning approach was adopted to address the forecasting problem by considering encoder-decoder networks. These networks were applied to forecast future resource consumption of the VNFs by regarding the problem as a time series forecasting problem, and recasting it as a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) problem. Different encoder-decoder network architectures were then utilized to forecast the resource consumption. The encoder-decoder networks were compared against a widely deployed classical time series forecasting model that served as a baseline model. The results show that while the considered encoder-decoder models failed to outperform the baseline model in overall Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE), the forecasting capabilities were more resilient to degradation over time. This suggests that the encoder-decoder networks are more appropriate for long-term forecasting, which is in agreement with related literature. Furthermore, the encoder-decoder models achieved competitive performance when compared to the baseline, despite being treated with limited hyperparameter-tuning and the absence of more sophisticated functionality such as attention. This work has shown that there is indeed potential for deep learning applications in forecasting of cloud resource consumption.