Learning Flow Scheduling

Datacenter applications have different resource requirements from network and developing flow scheduling heuristics for every workload is practically infeasible. In this paper, we show that deep reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to efficiently learn flow scheduling policies for different workloads without manual feature engineering. Specifically, we present LFS, which learns to optimize a high-level performance objective, e.g., maximize the number of flow admissions while meeting the deadlines. The LFS scheduler is trained through deep RL to learn a scheduling policy on continuous online flow arrivals. The evaluation results show that the trained LFS scheduler admits 1.05x more flows than the greedy flow scheduling heuristics under varying network load.