Inter-Domain Traffic Engineering Using an AS-Level Multipath Routing Architecture

Abstract

Traffic Engineering (TE) aims at distributing traffic through routes to suit a specific goal. BGP addresses TE in a very specific way: it is a single path system, and mixes traffic control and route dissemination by letting attributes influence the choice of the best path. Several techniques have been proposed but due to BGP characteristics they have high complexity requirements such as the need for coordination and information about the network that is not locally available. and, in most cases, the use of tunnelling. In a previous work we proposed an inter-domain routing architecture DTIA (Dynamic Topological Information Architecture) that builds a robust multipath routing system based on the inter-AS relationships and routing policies. DTIA separates traffic control from route dissemination and seems to have less complex requirements to provide TE. The aim of this paper is to assess the ability of such a system to provide TE maintaining the complexity overhead to a minimum. We propose a simple feedback protocol to avoid congestion and achieve better traffic distribution at inter-domain level using only local available traffic information and DTIA's routing information.