Using redistribution communities for interdomain traffic engineering

Bruno Quoitin, Steve Uhlig and Olivier Bonaventure

In this paper, we present a traffic engineering technique that can be used by regional ISPs and customer networks. On the basis of various characterizations of ASes in today s Internet we show the requirements of the small ASes. Then we detail the methods that such ASes currently use to engineer interdomain traffic.We present an analysis of real routing tables showing that a lot of ISPs rely on the BGP Community attribute to build scalable traffic engineering configurations. We also show that this solution suffers from several drawbacks that limit its widespread utilization. To avoid the problems of such a technique, we propose the redistribution communities, a special type of non transitive extended community attribute and show that the cost of implementing this solution is small.

Published in Quality of Future Internet Services (QoFIS 2002), October 2002.

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