Load-sensitive routing of long-lived IP flows

Anees Shaikh, Jennifer L. Rexford, Kang G. Shin

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

93 Scopus citations

Abstract

Internet service providers face a daunting challenge in provisioning network resources, due to the rapid growth of the Internet and wide fluctuations in the underlying traffic patterns. The ability of dynamic routing to circumvent congested links and improve application performance makes it a valuable traffic engineering tool. However, deployment of load-sensitive routing is hampered by the overheads imposed by link-state update propagation, path selection, and signaling. Under reasonable protocol and computational overheads, traditional approaches to load-sensitive routing of IP traffic are ineffective, and can introduce significant route flapping, since paths are selected based on out-of-date fink-state information. Although stability is improved by performing load-sensitive routing at the flow level, flapping still occurs, because most IP flows have a short duration relative to the desired frequency of fink-state updates. To address the efficiency and stability challenges of load-sensitive routing, we introduce a new hybrid approach that performs dynamic routing of long-lived flows, while forwarding shortlived flows on static preprovisioned paths. By relating the detection of long-lived flows to the timescale of fink-state update messages in the routing protocol, route stability is considerably improved. Through simulation experiments using a one-week ISP packet trace, we show that our hybrid approach significantly outperforms traditional static and dynamic routing schemes, by reacting to fluctuations in network load without introducing route flapping.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)215-226
Number of pages12
JournalComputer Communication Review
Volume29
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 1999
EventProceedings of the 1999 ACM SIGCOMM Conference 'Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication' - Cambridge, MA, United States
Duration: Aug 30 1999Sep 3 1999

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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