Efficient inter-domain traffic engineering with transit-edge hierarchical routing

Keywords: Internet routing Traffic engineering Transit-edge routing LISP Game theory a b s t r a c t The relentless growth of Internet, which has resulted in the increase of routing table sizes, requires consideration and new direction to address Internet scalability and resiliency. A possible direction is to move away from the flat legacy Internet routing to hierarchical routing, and introduce two-level hierarchical routing between edge networks and across transit networks. In this way, there is also an opportunity to separate the routing locator from the terminal identifier, to better manage IP mobility and mitigate important routing security issues. In this paper, we study the extended traffic engineering capabilities arising in a transit-edge hierarchical routing, focusing on those multi-homed edge networks (e.g., Cloud/content providers) that aim at increasing their Internet resiliency experience. We model the interaction between distant independent edge networks exchanging large traffic volumes using game theory, with the goal of seeking efficient edge-to-edge load-balancing solutions. The proposed traffic engineering framework relies on a non-cooperative potential game, built upon locator and path ranking costs, that indicates efficient equilibrium solution for the edge-to-edge load-balancing coordination problem. Simulations on real instances show that in comparison to the available standard protocols such as BGP and LISP, we can achieve a much higher degree of resiliency and stability. Internet traffic engineering is an important part of network design and engineering that deals with performance evaluation and optimization issues of operational IP networks. The main purpose of traffic engineering is to facilitate reliable network operation by providing methods that enhance network integrity and survivability, via routing and resource management, taking into account the occurrence of various network impairments, differentiated traffic scheduling and multi-class service provisioning [2]. The principal scope of implementation of Internet traffic engineering methods has been the intra-domain routing. Within the network of a single Internet carrier or service provider, the autonomous nature of the network has allowed the introduction of new capabilities, such as label-switching protocols, that natively allow for explicit routing and new services [3]. Within the inter-domain inter-carrier scope, instead, scalability, confidentiality and policy issues have limited reaching consensus for a systematic approach to inter-domain traffic engineering. With the current inter-domain routing protocol, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), levels of traffic engineering are possible through manipulating attributes associated with the BGP decision process, partially fulfilling the needs of the Internet network actors (transit, content and Internet service providers) …