AMPLE: an adaptive traffic engineering system based on virtual routing topologies

Abstract

Handling traffic dynamics in order to avoid network congestion and subsequent service disruptions is one of the key tasks performed by contemporary network management systems. Given the simple but rigid routing and forwarding functionalities in IP base environments, efficient resource management and control solutions against dynamic traffic conditions is still yet to be obtained. In this article, we introduce AMPLE - an efficient traffic engineering and management system that performs adaptive traffic control by using multiple virtualized routing topologies. The proposed system consists of two complementary components: offline link weight optimization that takes as input the physical network topology and tries to produce maximum routing path diversity across multiple virtual routing topologies for long term operation through the optimized setting of link weights. Based on these diverse paths, adaptive traffic control performs intelligent traffic splitting across individual routing topologies in reaction to the monitored network dynamics at short timescale. According to our evaluation with real network topologies and traffic traces, the proposed system is able to cope almost optimally with unpredicted traffic dynamics and, as such, it constitutes a new proposal for achieving better quality of service and overall network performance in IP networks.