Inter-Domain Routing with AS Number: A Traffic Engineering Perspective

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the current de facto standard inter-domain routing protocol, is not just responsible of disseminating reachability information, but also plays an important role on inter-domain traffic engineering. The inter-domain routing system is facing a combination challenge of supporting scalability and traffic engineering. On the one hand, as rapid growth of the routing table size, the inter-domain routing presents serious scaling problems. On the other side, as lack of systematic design, BGP does not facilitate common traffic engineering tasks. In this paper, we present ITER, a first step towards a systematic design for a scalable and efficient interdomain traffic engineering routing protocol. This protocol could select multiple paths between each source-destination, efficiently balance load across multiple paths in a predictable fashion, and flexibly give the transit domains control over the flow of traffic.