IGNNITION: Bridging the Gap Between Graph Neural Networks and Networking Systems

TL;DR

IGNNITION is an open-source framework that simplifies the development of graph neural networks for networking applications, making it accessible for network engineers without deep ML expertise.

Contribution

It introduces a high-level abstraction framework that enables fast, flexible GNN prototyping specifically tailored for networking systems.

Findings

GNN models built with IGNNITION match TensorFlow implementations in accuracy

The framework demonstrates versatility across different networking use cases

IGNNITION reduces development complexity for network engineers

Abstract

Recent years have seen the vast potential of Graph Neural Networks (GNN) in many fields where data is structured as graphs (e.g., chemistry, recommender systems). In particular, GNNs are becoming increasingly popular in the field of networking, as graphs are intrinsically present at many levels (e.g., topology, routing). The main novelty of GNNs is their ability to generalize to other networks unseen during training, which is an essential feature for developing practical Machine Learning (ML) solutions for networking. However, implementing a functional GNN prototype is currently a cumbersome task that requires strong skills in neural network programming. This poses an important barrier to network engineers that often do not have the necessary ML expertise. In this article, we present IGNNITION, a novel open-source framework that enables fast prototyping of GNNs for networking systems. IGNNITION is based on an intuitive high-level abstraction that hides the complexity behind GNNs, while still offering great flexibility to build custom GNN architectures. To showcase the versatility and performance of this framework, we implement two state-of-the-art GNN models applied to different networking use cases. Our results show that the GNN models produced by IGNNITION are equivalent in terms of accuracy and performance to their native implementations in TensorFlow.