Search Strategies in Inter-Domain Traffic Engineering

Inter-domain Traffic Engineering (TE) capabilities can significantly improve end-to-end network performance by allowing an ISP to route its traffic around congestion or failure occurring in other ISP networks. Despite its great importance, however, the state of the art in inter-domain TE is very primitive. The common practice is often "tweak and pray" -- tweak BGP policy, in the hope of shedding traffic from, for example, an overloaded peering link. A major challenge for inter-domain TE is the level of uncertainty an ISP is facing. With many potentially competing ISPs, global coordination can be very difficult. As a result, a single ISP only has limited (and often inaccurate) knowledge about user demand, network topology, available network resource and routing policies in other domains that their traffic traverses. in this pape