A Computation-Efficient Approach for Segment Routing Traffic Engineering

Abstract

The unprecedented growth of network traffic has brought excessive challenges to network operators. To prevent network congestion, network operators conduct traffic engineering (TE) for their routing optimization. In recent years, segment routing traffic engineering (SRTE) has emerged as one of the promising approaches for its high scalability and low control overheads. However, conventional SRTE approaches in large-scale networks are computationally prohibitive, which may lead to delayed system operations and unsatisfactory service qualities. In this paper, we formulate a bi-objective mixed-integer nonlinear program (BOMINLP) to investigate the trade-off between link utilization and computation time in SRTE. Due to the difficulty in solving the original problem directly, we decompose it into two sequential sub-problems. The first sub-problem is to minimize computation time through node selection, and the second one is to minimize maximum link utilization via flow assignment. To this end, we first employ randomized sampling based on stretch bounding to obtain a reduced solution space and then solve a linear program (LP) using existing software tools for the sub-problems. To evaluate our proposed solution, we employ network topologies and traffic matrices from publicly available datasets. Our simulation results show that our proposed solution can effectively reduce computation time while retaining comparable maximum link utilization as compared with several comparison approaches.