Abstract:

We consider an online traffic engineering problem where connections need to be setup one at a time as connection requests arrive sequentially. We propose an approach, called design based routing (DBR), whereby an optimized path design computed offline is used to guide online path setups. DBR takes advantage of input information based on network planning outputs, customer prescriptions, traffic projections and historical measurements, to build an approximate traffic demand matrix for path optimization. By means of simulation, we perform comparative evaluations under static and dynamic connections with different protection modes. The experimental results indicate that DBR outperforms widely deployed online techniques for path selection such as SPF and CSPF under a wide range of operating conditions. The results also indicate the robustness of DBR against uncertainty in traffic demand estimate. Keywords?Traffic engineering, online/offline, static/dynamic, optimization, protection, SPF, CSPF, DBR.

Anwar Elwalid is with Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, where he is a DMTS (Distinguished Member of Technical Staff). He received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnic Institute of New York, Brooklyn, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, New York. Since 1991 he has been with the Mathematics of Networks and Systems Research Department at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he developed theory and algorithms for network resource management and QoS support, and for the analysis and engineering of multimedia traffic. He holds several patents. His current research interests include IP and optical network architectures, traffic engineering and stochastic systems. He has been active in the Traffic Engineering and MPLS Working Groups of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). He served on the executive and technical program committees of several conferences. Dr. Elwalid is a member of Tau Beta Pi (National Engineering Honor Society), Sigma Xi, IFIP Working Group 7.3, and a senior member of the IEEE.