On the Advantages of Cooperative and Social Smart Route Control

Smart route control is being increasingly used as a way to dynamically improve the end-to-end performance of the outbound traffic of multihomed stub domains. However, all the solutions available at present have in common two drawbacks which are key motivations for this work. First, all solutions are standalone, so no routing control interactions exist between the domains sourcing and sinking the traffic. The consequences of this lack of interactions are quite coarse route control over the outbound traffic from the domains, and the inability to smartly control how traffic flows into the domains. The second drawback is that all available solutions behave in a fully selfish way, that is, they operate without considering the effects of their decisions in the performance of the network. Given these limitations, we propose to extend the existing route control model from standalone and selfish to a cooperative and social route control model. Our main contribution in this paper is to show that when several route controllers compete for the same network resources, the conventional ones are outperformed by those using a cooperative and social approach and this becomes especially noticeable as the network utilization increases. Our results reveal that it is possible to reduce the frequency of traffic relocations by more than a 50% on average and still obtain slightly better end-to-end traffic performance for delay-sensitive applications. A key advantage is that our extension can be installed and used today by simply performing software upgrades to any of the existing route control solutions.