Making IP traffic engineering robust to intra- and inter-AS transient link failures

Abstract

Intra- and inter-AS transient link failures are common in operational IP networks. Robust intra- and inter-AS traffic engineering (TE) schemes have been proposed to optimize network performance against transient link failures. The existing literature has focused solely on either intra- or inter-AS link failure. They have, however, neglected the interactions between robust intra- and inter-AS TE, specifically the impact of intra-AS link failure on inter-AS TE and vice versa. As a result, the overall network performance may not be truly robust to link failures if the interactions are neglected. This paper proposes a joint robust TE approach that takes the interactions into account for achieving good network performance under both normal state and any single intra- or inter-AS link failure. We propose a two-phase heuristic to solve the problem and compare its performance with four alternative approaches that do not consider the interactions. Evaluation results reveal that our joint robust TE approach achieves higher robustness against intra- and inter-AS link failures than all the alternatives.