Guaranteeing Quality of Service to Peering Traffic

Network operators connect their backbone networks together at peering points. It is well known that the peering points are the most congested parts of the backbone network. Network operators have little incentive to provision them well, and have few tools to decide how best to route traffic over them. In this paper we propose how peering networks can be congestion free, so long as we know the total amount of traffic between them. In particular, we propose the use of valiant load-balancing (VLB), which has been previously studied for individual backbone networks. In our approach, the backbone networks do not need to use VLB internally - they simply load-balance traffic over their peering links. Our analysis shows how the load-balancing should be done, and we conclude that no other method is more efficient than VLB in achieving a congestion-free network.