Load balancing inbound traffic in multihomed stub autonomous systems

Abstract

Abstract-In the Internet, with many competing networks each trying to optimise its own bandwidth, a stub network has limited knowledge about user demands, available network resources and routing policies of other networks. This uncertainty makes the task of interdomain traffic engineering for a stub network very challenging. The basic aim of a stub network connected to multiple ISPs (multihomed) is to load balance its traffic among its various edge links. Our goal in this work is to distribute the incoming traffic of a multihomed stub network among its various edge links. The focus is on networks that primarily download traffic from the Internet. Regulating the incoming traffic is difficult since it will require to influence the behaviour of the remote destinations. We performed a systematic analysis of our problem and showed that even a restricted instance of the problem is NPcomplete. We proposed simple, low-cost route control techniques to load balance traffic by reallocating the routes of outgoing traffic. The techniques were validated using synthetic as well as actual data collected under numerous traffic load conditions. Results show that we can achieve significant improvement in load balancing with minimum traffic re-assignments. Moreover, the proposed techniques neither require any third party assistance nor changes to existing protocols and network setup. This makes our schemes easily deployable in real networks.

Improved multobjective algorithm for dynamic load balancing of network traffic

“…A stub network [3] may have a dedicated link between itself and its uplink provider, but beyond a certain point its Internet traffic flow will share network resources with millions of other flows. And beyond that point, the stub network has no control on the network traffic.…”

“…A stub network [3] is a computer network with no knowledge of other networks. A stub autonomous system is one that is connected to only one other autonomous system, through which it gains access to the Internet.…”

Distributed route control schemes to load balance incoming traffic in multihomed stub networks

“…In this section we review the centralized routing techniques, in particular the greedy algorithm discussed in [3]. We highlight the difficulties of deploying the centralized approach in a distributed environment.…”

“…In order to compare the performance of the distributed scheme with that of its centralized counterpart, the experimental settings used in this experiment were exactly the same as that of experiment 2 in [3]. The topology considered consisted of 25 nodes, 50 intradomain links and 4 egress links.…”

“…In access networks the main objective is to optimize the way traffic enter the networks. Centralized routing techniques to distribute the incoming traffic of a multihomed stub network among its various egress links were proposed in [3]. Centralized routing protocols have the advantage that we need to advertise less information, administration is easy and the algorithms are simple.…”