Nick Feamster, Jay Borkenhagen, Jennifer Rexford
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, October 2003
Network operators must have control over the flow of traffic into, out
of, and across their networks. However, the Border Gateway Protocol
(BGP) does not facilitate common traffic engineering tasks, such as
balancing load across multiple links to a neighboring AS or directing
traffic to a different neighbor. Solving these problems is difficult
because the number of possible changes to routing policies is too
large to exhaustively test all possibilities, some changes in routing
policy can have an unpredictable effect on the flow of traffic, and
the BGP decision process implemented by router vendors limits an
operator's control over path selection.
We propose fundamental objectives for
interdomain traffic engineering and specific guidelines for
achieving these objectives within the context of
BGP.
Using routing and
traffic data from the AT&T backbone
we show how certain BGP
policy changes can move traffic in a predictable fashion, despite
limited knowledge about the routing policies in neighboring AS's.
Then, we show how operators can gain greater flexibility by relaxing
some steps in the BGP decision process and ensuring that neighboring
AS's send consistent advertisements at each peering location.
Finally, we show that an operator can manipulate traffic efficiently
by changing the routes for a small number of prefixes (or groups of
related prefixes) that consistently receive a large amount of traffic.
[Gzipped PostScript (103KB)]
Bibtex Entry:
@article{feamster2003guidelines,
author = "Nick Feamster and Jay Borkenhagen and Jennifer Rexford",
title = "{Guidelines for Internet Traffic Engineering}",
journal = {ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review},
year = {2003},
month = {October},
}