Proposal and investigation of a convolutional and lstm neural network for the cost-aware resource prediction in softwarized networks†

Resource prediction algorithms have been recently proposed in Network Function Virtualization architectures. A prediction-based resource allocation is characterized by higher operation costs due to: (i) Resource underestimate that leads to quality of service degradation; (ii) used cloud resource over allocation when a resource overestimate occurs. To reduce such a cost, we propose a cost-aware prediction algorithm able to minimize the sum of the two cost components. The proposed prediction solution is based on a convolutional and Long Short Term Memory neural network to handle the spatial and temporal correlations of the need processing capacities. We compare in a real network and traffic scenario the proposed technique to a traditional one in which the aim is to exactly predict the needed processing capacity. We show how the proposed solution allows for cost advantages in the order of 20%.