Inferring Visibility of Internet Traffic Matrices Using eXplainable AI

A large fraction of recent network management tasks rely on Internet traffic matrices, ranging from planning and troubleshooting to routing and anomaly detection. Despite extensive research efforts over the years, acquiring a comprehensive overview of network traffic remains a difficult and error-prone task. While the literature has mostly proposed increasingly accurate and complex Machine Learning (ML) models to reconstruct missing information, in this paper we propose an alternative approach to further enhance this process: combining the ML model with eXplainable AI (XAI) to analyze the model behavior, detect most significant features, and limit the reconstruction process to such reduced input. With this methodology, not only we simplify the problem, but the entire solution finds greater deployability as the data acquisition phase is also simplified. Numerical results demonstrate that, with our solution on a Convolution Neural Network model, the error during completion can be lowered by 80% for a network telemetry traffic reduction of 75%.