Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and service orchestration simplify the deployment and management of network and telecommunication services. The deployment of these services requires, typically, the allocation of Virtual Network Function -Forwarding Graph (VNF-FG), which implies not only the fulfillment of the service's requirements in terms of Quality of Service (QoS), but also considering the constraints of the underlying infrastructure. This topic has been well-studied in existing literature, however, its complexity and uncertainty of available information unveil challenges for researchers and engineers. In this paper, we explore the potential of reinforcement learning techniques for the placement of VNF-FGs. However, it turns out that even the most well-known learning technique is ineffective in the context of a large-scale action space. In this respect, we propose approaches to find out feasible solutions while improving significantly the exploration of the action space. The simulation results clearly show the effectiveness of the proposed learning approach for this category of problems. Moreover, thanks to the deep learning process, the performance of the proposed approach is improved over time.

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Knowledge-Defined networking (KDN) is a concept that relies on Software-Defined networking (SDN) and Machine Learning (ML) in order to operate and optimize data networks. Thanks to SDN, a centralized path calculation can be deployed, thus enhancing the network utilization as well as Quality of Services (QoS). QoS-aware routing problem is a high complexity problem, especially when there are multiple flows coexisting in the same network. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is an emerging technique that is able to cope with such complex problem. Recent studies confirm the ability of DRL in solving complex routing problems; however, its performance in the network with QoSsensitive flows has not been addressed. In this paper, we exploit a DRL agent with convolutional neural networks in the context of KDN in order to enhance the performance of QoS-aware routing. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to improve the performance of routing configurations significantly even in complex networks.

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Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and service orchestration simplify the deployment and management of network and telecommunication services. The deployment of these services require, typically, the allocation of Virtual Network Function-Forwarding Graph (VNF-FG), which implies not only the fulfillment of the service's requirements in terms of Quality of Service (QoS), but also considering the constraints of the underlying infrastructure. This topic has been well-studied in existing literature, however, its complexity and uncertainty unveil many challenges for researchers and engineers. This issue is especially complex when it comes to placing a service on several non-cooperative domains, where the network operators hide their infrastructure to other competing domains. In this paper, we address these problems by proposing a deep reinforcement learning based VNF-FG embedding approach. The results provide insights into behaviors of non-cooperative domains. They also show the efficiency of proposed VNF-FG deployment approach having automatic inter-domain load balancing.