NetLLM: Adapting Large Language Models for Networking

Duo Wu, Xianda Wang, Yaqi Qiao, Zhi Wang, Junchen Jiang, Shuguang Cui, Fangxin Wang

Abstract: Many networking tasks now employ deep learning (DL) to solve complex prediction and optimization problems. However, current design philosophy of DL-based algorithms entails intensive engineering overhead due to the manual design of deep neural networks (DNNs) for different networking tasks. Besides, DNNs tend to achieve poor generalization performance on unseen data distributions/environments.Motivated by the recent success of large language models (LLMs), this work studies the LLM adaptation for networking to explore a more sustainable design philosophy. With the powerful pre-trained knowledge, the LLM is promising to serve as the foundation model to achieve "one model for all tasks" with even better performance and stronger generalization. In pursuit of this vision, we present NetLLM, the first framework that provides a coherent design to harness the powerful capabilities of LLMs with low efforts to solve networking problems. Specifically, NetLLM empowers the LLM to effectively process multimodal data in networking and efficiently generate task-specific answers. Besides, NetLLM drastically reduces the costs of fine-tuning the LLM to acquire domain knowledge for networking. Across three networking-related use cases - viewport prediction, adaptive bitrate streaming and cluster job scheduling, we showcase that the NetLLM-adapted LLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.