Traffic engineering in segment routing networks

Segment routing (SR) has been recently proposed as an alternative traffic engineering (TE) technology enabling relevant simplifications in control plane operations. In the literature, preliminary investigations on SR have focused on label encoding algorithms and experimental assessments, without carefully addressing some key aspects of SR in terms of the overall network TE performance. In this study, ILP models and heuristics are proposed and successfully utilized to assess the TE performance of SR-based packet networks. Results show that the default SR behavior of exploiting equal cost multiple paths (ECMP) may lead to several drawbacks, including higher network resource utilization with respect to cases where ECMP is avoided. Moreover, results show that, by properly performing segment list computations, it is possible to achieve very effective TE solutions by just using a very limited number of stacked labels, thus successfully exploiting the benefits of the SR technology. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.