An approach to alleviate link overload as observed on an IP backbone

Abstract

Shortest path routing protocols may suffer from congestion due to the use of a single shortest path between a source and a destination. The goal of our work is to first understand how links become overloaded in an IP backbone, and then to explore if the routing protocol, -either in its existing form, or in some enhanced form could be made to respond immediately to overload and reduce the likelihood of its occurrence. Our method is to use extensive measurements of Sprint's backbone network, measuring 138 links between September 2000 and June 2001. We find that since the backbone is designed to be overprovisioned, link overload is rare, and when it occurs, 80% of the time it is caused due to link failures. Furthermore, we find that when a link is overloaded, few (if any) other links in the network are also overloaded. This suggests that deflecting packets to less utilized alternate paths could be an effective method for tackling overload. We analytically derive the condition that a network, which has multiple equal length shortest paths between every pair of nodes (as is common in the highly meshed backbone networks) can provide for loop-free deflection paths if all the link weights are within a ratio 1 + 1/(d- I) of each other; where d is the diameter of the network. Based on our measurements, the nature of the backbone topology and the careful use of link weights, we propose a deflection routing algorithm to tackle link overload where each node makes local decisions. Simulations suggest that this can be a simple and efficient way to overcome link overload, without requiring any changes to the routing protocol.