Distributed out-bound load balancing in Inter-AS routing by random matchings

The Internet is composed of a collection of interconnected and self-administered autonomous systems (ASms). Inter-AS routing is accomplished by having neighboring ASms exchange reachability information via the border gateway protocol. An AS is said to be a transit AS if it allows traffic from other ASms to cross through it. In particular, transit ASms provide transit services for traffic between customer and provider ASms. In this paper, we focus on maximizing the utilization of resources at transit ASms. In particular, inter-AS links have been shown to be a bottleneck. To make better use of inter-AS links, we consider problem of balancing the load among inter-AS links. We call that problem as balanced-flow assignment problem (B-FAPM). We show that the B-FAPM is NP-hard, and thus, likely intractable. We then present a heuristic protocol, the balanced-flow assignment protocol (B-FAPL), that balances the out-bound traffic loads on inter-AS links. Our solution is distributed and uses random matching to assign in-bound flows to out-bind inter-AS links.