Rethinking Internet traffic management: From multiple decompositions to a practical protocol

In the Internet today, traffic management spans congestion control (at end hosts), routing protocols (on routers), and traffic engineering (by network operators). Historically, this division of functionality evolved organically. In this paper, we perform a top-down redesign of traffic management using recent innovations in optimization theory. First, we propose an objective function that captures the goals of end users and network operators. Using all known optimization decomposition techniques, we generate four distributed algorithms that divide traffic over multiple paths based on feedback from the network links. Combining the best features of the algorithms, we construct TRUMP: a traffic management protocol that is distributed, adaptive, robust, flexible and easy to manage. Further, TRUMP can operate based on implicit feedback about packet loss and delay. We show that using optimization decompositions as a foundation, simulations as a building block, and human intuition as a guide can be a principled approach to protocol design.