Traffic Engineering (TE)

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 Network Congestion
• Causes of congestion
– Lack of network resources
– Uneven distribution of traffic caused by current dynamic
routing protocols
• Consequences of congestion
– High loss rate
– Low throughput
– Long end-to-end delay
• Intserv and Diffserv provide differentiated
degradation of performance for different traffic
when the network is congested 2
 Traffic Engineering
• Traffic Engineering (TE) is the process of
distributing traffic flows through the
network to achieve load balancing
• TE leads to:
– Reduced congestion
– Improved bandwidth utilization

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 TE Approaches
• Preplanned:
– OSPF + smart link weight setting
– MPLS + optimal general routing
• On demand
– MPLS + Constraint-Based Routing

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 OSPF Routing
• Each link has a static link weight configured
by the network operator.
– Examples: unit weight, weight proportional to
physical distance of link, weight inversely
proportional to link capacity
• Packets routed over the shortest path to
destinations
– When multiple shortest paths exist to a
destination, traffic is split evenly among the paths
• Drawback: may cause uneven distribution of
traffic
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 OSPF Routing
• Routing depends on the choice of link
weights  Can control the distribution
of traffic in the network by tuning the link
weights.

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 Weight Tuning in OSPF
• All links have same capacity, nodes q, r, s, w each
has one unit of traffic to send to node t.
• Objective: minimize the maximum link load.

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 Optimization of OSPF Link
Weights
• Given a network topology and a traffic
matrix, find an optimal setting of the link
weights so that a certain objective is
achieved
• Example objectives
– Minimize the maximum link utilization (link
utilization = link load/link capacity)
– Minimize total cost of all links where the cost
of a link is a function of link utilization
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 Optimization of OSPF Link
Weights
• Local search heuristic [Fortz and
Thorup 2000]
– Finding: For real networks, a good setting
of the link weights can make OSPF
perform almost as well as optimal general
routing
• General routing: traffic flow between
nodes s and d can be split arbitrarily
over the paths between s and d
– Achievable with MPLS 9
 Traffic Trunk
• A traffic trunk is an aggregation of traffic
flows belonging to the same class that are
placed inside a LSP
• Attributes of a traffic trunk
– QoS requirements
– Policy: include/exclude certain links

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Constraint-Based Routing (CBR)
• Given a traffic trunk, compute a path for it subject
to multiple constraints
– QoS constraints
– Resource availability constraints
– Policy constraints
• Goals of CBR:
– Meet QoS requirements of the traffic trunk
– Increase the utilization of the network
• MPLS can setup LSPs along paths determined by
CBR
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 Routing Metrics
• Let d(i,j) be a metric for link (i,j). For any path P
= (i, j, k, …, l, m), metric d is:
additive if d(P) = d(i,j) + d(j,k) + … + d(l,m)
– delay, jitter, hop-count
multiplicative if d(P) = d(i,j) * d(j,k) * … * d(l,m)
– reliability (i.e., 1-loss rate)
concave if d(P) = min{d(i,j), d(j,k), …, d(l,m)}
– bandwidth

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 Complexity of CBR
• Computing a route subject to constraints of
two or more additive and/or multiplicative
metrics is NP-complete.
• The computationally feasible combinations
of metrics are bandwidth and one of the
other metrics.

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 Path Computation
• Bandwidth and hop-count constraints are
commonly used in path computation
– Many real-time applications will require a certain
amount of bandwidth.
– The amount of resources consumed by a flow is
proportional to the number of hops it traverses
• Path Computation algorithm:
Step 1. Prune links if:
– insufficient bandwidth
– violate policy constraints
Step 2. Compute shortest path 14
Information Requirement of CBR
• Information needed by CBR:
– Network topology
– Available bandwidth on links
• Routers need to distribute new link state
information, i.e., link available bandwidth
– Extend the link state advertisements of routing
protocols (OSPF, IS-IS)

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 Information Distribution
• Flooding link state advertisements
whenever a link’s available bandwidth
changes is too expensive
• A tradeoff must be made between the
accuracy of link available bandwidth
information and the frequency of flooding
of link state advertisements.

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 Information Distribution
• Periodic scheme
– Periodically, a node checks if the current link status is
the same as the one lastly broadcasted
– If different, floods updated links status
• Threshold scheme: flood LSA on significant
changes of available bandwidth (e.g., more than
50% or more than 10 Mbps)
• On topology changes: link addition/removal, link
down/up
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 Information Distribution
• LSP setup may fail due to inaccurate link
information
• When a node refuses to setup an LSP due to
insufficient link bandwidth, it broadcasts an
update of its available bandwidth

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 Tradeoff Between Resource
Conservation and Load Balancing
• Widest-shortest path routing: choose a path with
min hop-count; if more than one such path, choose
the one with the largest available bandwidth
– Emphasize preserving network resources
• Shortest-widest path routing: choose a path with
largest available bandwidth; if more than one such
path, choose the one with the min hop-count
– Emphasizes load balancing

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