GATEway: symbiotic inter-domain traffic engineering

Abstract

There are a group of problems in networking that can most naturally be described as optimization problems (network design, traffic engineering, etc.). There has been a great deal of research devoted to solving these problems, but this research has been concentrated on intra-domain problems where one network operator has complete information and control. An emerging field is interdomain engineering, for instance, traffic engineering between large autonomous networks. Extending intra-domain optimization techniques to inter-domain problems is often impossible without the measurements and control available within a domain. This paper presents an alternative: we propose a method for traffic engineering that doesn't require sharing of important information across domains. The method extends the idea of genetic algorithms to allow symbiotic evolution between two parties. Both parties may improve their performance without revealing their data, other than what would be easily observed in any case. We show the method provides large reductions in network congestion, close to the optimal shortest path routing across a pair of networks. The results are highly robust to measurement noise, the method is very flexible, and it can be applied using existing routing.

Inter-domain traffic engineering as bi-level network flow optimization

“…Promising benefits of cooperative TE have driven research community to develop signaling protocols to mediate such negotiation and distributed decision making [30], [31]. Among existing work, [32], [33], [18] are the most closely related to the decomposable network flow optimization based perspective that we adopt for cooperative inter-domain TE. These approaches, like the one we envision, do not require the individual ISPs to reveal their intra-domain topology or state directly, but only in the form of transit/forwarding costs.…”

“…A cooperative optimization-based approach to inter-domain TE based on dual decomposition and Nash bargaining is described in [32]; however the analysis is done only for a set of two ISPs. A symbiotic optimization based inter-domain TE approach is discussed in [33], but no formal analysis is presented on the optimality of the approach. The authors in [18] study flow equilibrium efficiency with optimal routing at the intra-domain level and selfish (non-cooperative) routing across domains.…”