Joint optimization of performance and economics in inter-domain traffic engineering

Abstract

A major functionality of Inter-domain Traffic Engineering is to optimally allocate resources to meet traffic demand. We implement this functionality by introducing economics into the problem of performance optimization, achieving maximum performance while pursuing minimum economic costs. In this paper we propose the DOPE model (Dual-objective Optimization on Performance and Economics) as the foundation of building an Inter-domain Traffic Engineering architecture which optimizes performance and reduces economic costs simultaneously. We utilize the well-known concept of Nash Bargaining to optimize the performance so as to make the solution Pareto-efficient and fair. In addition we introduce the Revenue Sharing Contract in order to make the ISPs collaborate voluntarily to minimize the social economic costs. To protect ISPs from the leakage of sensitive information, we take a Decomposition Method, which combines the Sub-gradient Method with Lagrangian Relaxation Algorithm, and separates the overall dual-objective optimization problem into partial sub-problems. These sub-problems can be solved independently by ISPs. Our proposed approach is evaluated in several experiments with simulated networks. The results show that our approach converges quickly and performs as well as the centralized solution with full knowledge of the networks. Besides, our approach achieves both optimized performance and reduced economic costs, which is significantly better than existing unilateral methods. Therefore, we believe that our approach is an effective solution to the problem of Inter-domain Traffic Engineering, and will be highly adopted by ISPs when compared with existing approaches.