Efficient inter-domain traffic engineering with transit-edge hierarchical routing

Abstract

The relentless growth of Internet, which has resulted in the increase of routing table sizes, requires consideration and new direction to address Internet scalability and resiliency. A possible direction is to move away from the flat legacy Internet routing to hierarchical routing, and introduce two-level hierarchical routing between edge networks and across transit networks. In this way, there is also an opportunity to separate the routing locator from the terminal identifier, to better manage IP mobility and mitigate important routing security issues. In this paper, we study the extended traffic engineering capabilities arising in a transit-edge hierarchical routing, focusing on those multi-homed edge networks (e.g., Cloud/content providers) that aim at increasing their Internet resiliency experience. We model the interaction between distant independent edge networks exchanging large traffic volumes using game theory, with the goal of seeking efficient edge-to-edge load-balancing solutions. The proposed traffic engineering framework relies on a non-cooperative potential game, built upon locator and path ranking costs, that indicates efficient equilibrium solution for the edge-to-edge load-balancing coordination problem. Simulations on real instances show that in comparison to the available standard protocols such as BGP and LISP, we can achieve a much higher degree of resiliency and stability.1A preliminary version of this paper has been presented at the 2011 IEEE Int. Conference on Communications (ICC 2011) [1].1