PetTC: Pairwise Joint Embedding Based Contrastive Tensor Completion for Network Traffic Monitoring Services

Network traffic matrices often suffer from incompleteness and sparsity due to various factors, including network device policies and system limitations. The incompleteness can undermine the reliability and accuracy of network traffic monitoring services, negatively impacting downstream tasks such as network planning and fault diagnosis. Our focus is on network traffic data recovery, intending to infer missing traffic data from partial measurements accurately. Although tensor completion algorithms are quite effective in recovering traffic data, existing models often overlook cross-domain traffic relationships and fail to account for the order and distribution of traffic, leading to reduced recovery accuracy. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new contrastive tensor completion model that utilizes pairwise joint embedding. This model employs innovative techniques, including a cross-domain embedding module to avoid information homogeneity and enhance model expressiveness, a contrastive module to preserve the order and distribution of traffic volumes, and an injective interaction module to map entry embeddings into the numerical space, ensuring convergence and retaining the original numerical distribution. Experiments on three real-world network traffic datasets show that our model significantly reduces the error in missing traffic data recovery compared to other existing models while maintaining traffic order and distribution.