An Intelligent Packet Forwarding Approach for Disaster Recovery Networks

Disasters, such as earthquakes, typhoons, and tsunamis, usually cause extreme damages to the communication infrastructures, which results in a heavy recovery workload and seriously affects people's life. The disaster recovery networks play a critical role to reduce the loss caused by the disasters. However, the suddenly varying traffic demand and limited resources after disasters may lead to the repetitive reconfigurations for running the existing packet forwarding strategies, such as the shortest path algorithms. To handle this problem, it is necessary to adopt the deep learning technique to develop a disaster-resilient solution. In this paper, we utilize the deep reinforcement learning technique to propose a self-adaptive routing method for the Movable and Deployable Resource Unit (MDRU) based backbone network. Compared with existing deep learning based routing strategy, our proposal can adapt to the sudden network errors. Moreover, we also analyze the deployment manner and consider a centralized control structure to significantly balance the traffic.