Yakun Ren | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

PolicyCache-SDN: Hierarchical Intra-Path Learning for Adaptive SDN Traffic Control

Software defined networks offer global visibility, yet centralized control loops are too slow for transient congestion and bursty traffic dynamics. Existing learned traffic control schemes often rely on offline training, making them fragile under distribution shifts. We present PolicyCache-SDN, a hierarchical SDN traffic control framework that enables local online adaptation under centralized policy control. Its key abstraction is a policy envelope: the controller compiles network wide intent into bounded per path action spaces, while edge agents learn and execute metering, queueing, and rerouting decisions only within those bounds. Policy envelopes also make local actions auditable and reversible when they affect shared bottlenecks. Evaluation on a 1,024 host software SDN testbed shows that PolicyCache-SDN improves average core link utilization by 35.5% over Static ECMP and 18.3% over Centralized TE. It reduces elephant flow P99 FCT by 34.3% over end host congestion control, lowers SLA violations from 18.2% to 6.8%, and uses less than 2% CPU and 12 MB memory per edge agent. The source code is available in an anonymized repository at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/JCC2026-PolicyCache-SDN/.

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arXiv2025

Mamba4Net: Distilled Hybrid Mamba Large Language Models For Networking

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being adopted in networking research to address domain-specific challenges. However, their quadratic time complexity and substantial model sizes often result in significant computational overhead and memory constraints, particularly in resource-constrained environments. Drawing inspiration from the efficiency and performance of the Deepseek-R1 model within the knowledge distillation paradigm, this paper introduces Mamba4Net, a novel cross-architecture distillation framework. Mamba4Net transfers networking-specific knowledge from transformer-based LLMs to student models built on the Mamba architecture, which features linear time complexity. This design substantially enhances computational efficiency compared to the quadratic complexity of transformer-based models, while the reduced model size further minimizes computational demands, improving overall performance and resource utilization. To evaluate its effectiveness, Mamba4Net was tested across three diverse networking tasks: viewport prediction, adaptive bitrate streaming, and cluster job scheduling. Compared to existing methods that do not leverage LLMs, Mamba4Net demonstrates superior task performance. Furthermore, relative to direct applications of transformer-based LLMs, it achieves significant efficiency gains, including a throughput 3.96 times higher and a storage footprint of only 5.48% of that required by previous LLM-based approaches. These results highlight Mamba4Net's potential to enable the cost-effective application of LLM-derived knowledge in networking contexts. The source code is openly available to support further research and development.

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