A Robustness Approach to Inter-Autonomous System Outbound Traffic Engineering

Abstract

Inter-AS outbound Traffic Engineering (TE) aims to control the flow of traffic exiting an AS so as to optimize inter-AS TE objectives such as load balancing among multiple downstream ASes. The inter-AS traffic matrix is fundamental input for outbound TE and its accuracy is essential for the target performance to be achieved. However, deriving an accurate traffic matrix is far from trivial. This paper proposes a robust approach for outbound TE to manage traffic demand uncertainty through Scenario-based Robust Optimization. The objective of this robust outbound TE is to minimize the worstcase maximum inter-AS link utilization across a set of inter-AS traffic matrices while minimizing the performance deviation from the optimal solutions. Simulation results reveal that the robust outbound TE is capable of achieving reasonably good performance under all the given traffic matrices while nonrobust approaches are not.

An overview of routing optimization for internet traffic engineering

“…The COPE MPLS-based TE approach [106] was proposed to optimize for the expected TM scenarios while providing a worst case performance guarantee for unexpected ones, including those caused by link failures and traffic spikes. On the other hand, for interdomain TE, the authors in [107] proposed an outbound TE approach based on scenario-based robust optimization, taking as input a set of interdomain TMs. The objective of their work is to obtain an outbound TE solution that achieves good maximum interdomain link utilization while minimizing the performance gap between the achieved solution and the optimal solution for any given interdomain TM.…”