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

  • Authors:

  • Mina Amin;Kin-Hon Ho;George Pavlou;Michael Howarth

  • Affiliations:

  • Centre for Communication Systems Research, Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, UK GU2 7XH;Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong;Networks and Services Research Lab, Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering, University College London, London, UK WC1E 7JE;Centre for Communication Systems Research, Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, UK GU2 7XH

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Network and Systems Management
  • Year:
  • 2009

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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 disruptions 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.