Making Routing Robust to Changing Traffic Demands: Algorithms and Evaluation

Abstract

Intra-domain traffic engineering can significantly enhance the performance of large IP backbone networks. Two important components of traffic engineering are understanding the traffic demands and configuring the routing protocols. These two components are inter-linked, as it is widely believed that an accurate view of traffic is important for optimizing the configuration of routing protocols, and through that, the utilization of the network. This basic premise, however, seems never to have been quantified. How important is accurate knowledge of traffic demands for obtaining good utilization of the network? Since traffic demand values are dynamic and illusive, is it possible to obtain a routing that is "robust" to variations in demands? We develop novel algorithms for constructing optimal robust routings and for evaluating the performance of any given routing on loosely constrained rich sets of traffic demands. Armed with these algorithms we explore these questions on a diverse collection of ISP networks. We arrive at a surprising conclusion: it is possible to obtain a robust routing that guarantees a nearly optimal utilization with a fairly limited knowledge of the applicable traffic demands