TNDP: Tensor-Based Network Distance Prediction With Confidence Intervals

The knowledge of network distances, in the form of delay or latency, for example, is beneficial to a number of distributed applications. Notice that it is difficult and expensive to implement global network measurements to obtain network distance, a feasible idea is to predict unknown distances by introducing network coordinates with limited network measurements. The existing solutions always represent the unknown network distances in a rather unique number. However, research and applications indicate that the real network distances are hard to be accurately figured out and changes subtly in an interval over time with the dynamic network environments. Accordingly, this article proposes a tensor-based network distance prediction (TNDP) approach to represent network distance with confidence intervals, by exploiting the random distance tensor and distributed matrix factorization. With a small set of network measurements among the nodes selected randomly, a distance matrix tensor has been established and factorized into the product of two location matrixes with the adaptive SGD-based learning solution. By introducing the important training determinants, including weight matrix, regularization coefficient, and minibatch gradient descent with the exponential decay rates, the unknown distances among nodes can be accurately inferred in the forms of confidence intervals, with quick convergence and less overfitting. Extensive experimental simulations on a wide variety of available data sets demonstrate that TNDP is superior to other approaches in terms of accuracy for network distance prediction.