Minimum interference routing with applications to MPLS traffic engineering

Abstract

This paper presents a new algorithm for dynamic routing of bandwidth-guaranteed tunnels when tunnel routing requests arrive one-by-one and there is no a priori knowledge regarding future requests. This problem is motivated by service provider needs for fast deployment of bandwidth-guaranteed services and the consequent need in backbone networks for fast provisioning of bandwidth-guaranteed paths. Offline routing algorithms cannot be used since they require a priori knowledge of all tunnel requests that are to be routed. Instead, on-line algorithms that handle requests arriving one-by-one and that satisfy as many potential future demands as possible are needed. The newly developed algorithm is an on-line algorithm and is based on the idea that a newly routed tunnel must follow a route that does not interfere too much with a route that may be to satisfy a future demand. We show that this problem is NP-hard. We then develop a path selection heuristic that is based on the idea of deferred loading of certain critical links. These links are identified by the algorithm as links that, if heavily loaded, would make it impossible to satisfy future demands between certain ingress-egress pairs. Like min-hop routing, the presented algorithm uses link-state information and some auxiliary capacity information for path selection. Unlike previous algorithms, the proposed algorithm exploits any available knowledge of the network ingress-egress points of potential future demands even though the demands themselves are unknown.