Internet Traffic Engineering
O. Bonaventure, P. Trimintzios, G. Pavlou, B. Quoitin, A. Azcorra, M. Bagnulo, P. Flegkas, A. Garcia-Martinez, P. Georgatsos, L. Georgiadis, C. Jacquenet, L. Swinnen, S. Tandel and S. Uhlig
Traffic engineering encompasses a set of techniques that can be used
to control the flow of traffic in data networks. We discuss several
of those techniques that have been developed during the last few
years. Some techniques are focused on pure IP networks while others
have been designed with emerging technologies for scalable Quality of
Service (QoS) such as Differentiated Services and MPLS in mind. We
first
discuss traffic engineering techniques inside a single domain. We
show that by using a non-linear programming formulation of the traffic
engineering problem it is possible to meet the requirements of
demanding customer traffic, while optimising the use of network
resources, through the means of an automated provisioning system. We
also extend the functionality of the traffic engineering system
through policies.
In the following, we discuss the techniques that can be used to
control the flow of packets between domains. First, we briefly
describe interdomain routing and the Border Gateway Protocol
(BGP). Second, we summarise the characteristics of interdomain traffic
based on measurements with two different Internet Service
Providers. We show by simulations the limitations of several BGP-based
traffic engineering techniques that are currently used on the
Internet. Then, we discuss the utilisation of BGP to exchange QoS
information between domains by using the QOS\_NLRI attribute to allow
BGP to select more optimum paths. Finally, we consider the
multi-homing problem and analyse the current proposed IPv6
multi-homing solutions are analysed along with their impact on
communication quality.
Published in Quality of Future Internet Services, Cost263 final report, September 2003.
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