Interdomain traffic engineering with BGP
B. Quoitin, S. Uhlig, C. Pelsser, L. Swinnen and O. Bonaventure
Traffic engineering is performed by means of a set of techniques that can be
used to better control the flow of packets inside an IP network. We discuss
the utilization of these techniques across interdomain boundaries in the
global Internet. We first analyze the characteristics of interdomain traffic
on the basis of measurements from three different Internet Service Providers
and show that a small number of sources are responsible for a large fraction
of the traffic. Across interdomain boundaries, traffic engineering relies on
a careful tuning of the route advertisements sent via the Border Gateway
Protocol (BGP). We explain how this tuning can can be used to control the
flow of the incoming and of the outgoing traffic and identify their
limitations.
Published in IEEE Communications Magazine Internet Technology Series, May 2003.
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