Traffic engineering using segment routing and considering requirements of a carrier IP network

Abstract

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are challenged by increasing traffic demands. Advanced Traffic Engineering (TE) is one way to overcome this challenge. Segment Routing (SR) is a relatively new approach for TE. To decide whether SR is a good approach for deployment in carrier IP backbone networks, it has to show its benefits in real-world scenarios and still needs to be feasible from the network operation and management point of view. In this paper, we analyze traffic data from a European tier one backbone network from 2011 to 2015. The total traffic increases significantly throughout that period. We analyze geographic differences to select representative traffic peak times as reference scenarios for an evaluation of TE using SR for real-world topologies and traffic demands. Finally, we extend existing SR formulations to consider requirements from network operation and management. Our evaluation results show that SR yields close to optimal results while still being deployable with reasonable effort.