Designing BGP-based outbound traffic engineering techniques for stub ASes
Steve Uhlig and Olivier Bonaventure
Today, most multi-connected autonomous systems (AS) need to control the flow of their
interdomain traffic for both performance and economical reasons. This is usually done by
manually tweaking the BGP configurations of the routers on an error-prone trial-and-error
basis. In this paper, we demonstrate that designing systematic BGP-based traffic engineering
techniques for stub ASes are possible. Our approach to solve this traffic engineering problem
is to allow the network operator to define objective functions on the interdomain traffic.
Those objective functions are used by an optimization box placed inside the AS that controls
the interdomain traffic by tuning the iBGP messages distributed inside the AS. We show
that the utilization of an efficient evolutionary algorithm allows to both optimize the objective
function and limit the number of iBGP messages. By keeping a lifetime on the tweaked routes,
we also show that providing stability to the interdomain path followed by the traffic is possible.
We evaluate the performance of solution based on traffic traces from two stub ASes of different
sizes. Our simulations show that the interdomain traffic can be efficiently engineered by using
not more than a few iBGP advertisements per minute.
Our contribution in this paper is to demonstrate that by carefully thinking the design of the
interdomain traffic engineering technique, stub ASes can engineer their outbound traffic over
relatively short timescales, by exclusively tweaking their BGP routes, and with a minimal burden
on BGP. Systematic BGP-based traffic engineering for stub ASes is thus possible at a very limited
cost in terms of iBGP messages.
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, October 2004.
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