Robust Traffic Engineering Using Multi-Topology Routing

Intra-domain traffic engineering can significantly enhance the performance of large IP backbone networks. An important component of current methods for traffic engineering with link state routing protocols like OSPF is accurate knowledge of traffic matrix. However, the traffic matrix is unknown and varies with time. So it is important to obtain a traffic engineering method that is "robust" to variations in traffic matrix. In this paper, we use multi-topology routing (MTR) for providing robust traffic engineering in IP networks. We first formulate the problem of robust traffic engineering using MTR as a mixed integer programming problem (MIP). To make the problem solvable, we then decompose the problem into logical topologies design problem and traffic assignment problem, which are solved by a heuristic algorithm and a tractable linear programming (LP) model, respectively. Using simulation results on Rocketfuel topologies, we study and discuss effectiveness of the proposed robust traffic engineering approach. Simulation results show that robust traffic engineering based on MTR is promising.