REBATE: A REpulsive-BAsed Traffic Engineering protocol for dynamic scale-free networks

Abstract

Nowadays the abundance of IoT devices has the potential of changing our lives dramatically, but brings new routing and traffic orchestration challenges for the next-generation Internet providers: core routers are already overwhelmed, see e.g, the routing table size growth problem. Although some researchers still argue whether or not the next-generation networks should feature scale-free properties, recent results have shown benefits of embedding such scale-free networks in a hyperbolic space of negative curvature. Specifically, this allows geometrically route packets by using only a local topology knowledge (i.e., with average O∗(1) space–time complexity) at no extra communication overhead (i.e., without routing protocols). To our knowledge, however, there is no Traffic Engineering (TE) protocol with the aforementioned properties that can be used in dynamic scale-free networks. In this paper, we propose the first to our knowledge REpulsive-BAsed Traffic Engineering (REBATE) protocol for dynamic scale-free networks. REBATE is built upon dual principles of the demand-aware TE and fundamentals properties of hyperbolic spaces. Using trace-driven numerical simulations, we then show how REBATE can reduce the maximum link utilization up to 25% when compared to a common geometric routing-based traffic steering. Although REBATE can perform worse than common demands-aware and oblivious TE approaches, we think that our work should pave the way for more efficient TE in the next-generation dynamic scale-free networks.