A Closed-Loop Control Traffic Engineering System for the Dynamic Load Balancing of Inter-AS Traffic

Abstract

Inter-AS outbound traffic engineering (TE) is a set of techniques for controlling inter-AS traffic exiting an autonomous system (AS) by assigning the traffic to the best egress points (i.e. routers or links) from which the traffic is forwarded to adjacent ASes towards the destinations. In practice, changing network conditions such as inter-AS traffic demand variation, link failures and inter-AS routing changes occur dynamically. These changes can make fixed outbound TE solutions inadequate and may subsequently cause inter-AS links to become congested. In order to overcome this problem, we propose the deployment of a closed loop control traffic engineering system that makes outbound traffic robust to inter-AS link failures and adaptive to changing network conditions. The objective is to keep the inter-AS link utilization balanced under unexpected events while reducing service disruption and reconfiguration overheads. Our evaluation results show that the proposed system can successfully achieve better load balancing with less service disruption and re-configuration overhead in comparison to alternative approaches.

Joint optimization of intra- and inter-autonomous system traffic engineering

“…A common inter-AS TE objective is to balance the load over inter-AS links. Various outbound inter-AS TE algorithms have been proposed [4,21,22]. In current practice, inter-AS TE is typically enforced by adjusting BGP route attributes such as local-pref, AS path length, MED, etc.…”