Failure Resiliency With Only a Few Tunnels – Enabling Segment Routing for Traffic Engineering

Abstract

Traffic engineering is an important concept that allows Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to utilize their existing routing hardware more efficiently. One technology that can be used is Segment Routing (SR). In this paper, we address the use of SR to increase the resilience against failure scenarios. In addition, we develop solutions that are manageable and, thus, deployable in a tier 1 ISP network. We propose a post-convergence aware SR based optimization model. With it, we can proactively find a single SR configuration that is beneficial in all predefined failure scenarios, including single link failures, shared risk link group failures, and node failures. In addition to this use-case, we also extend the optimization model to include other important practical requirements such as keeping the number of SR tunnels to a minimum, avoiding arbitrary traffic splitting, or meeting latency bounds. We evaluate our approaches with recently measured data from a tier 1 ISP and show that we can improve over state of the art routing approaches.