A Route Deflection Approach to Minimize Routing Disruptions for Inter-AS Traffic Engineering

A recent survey [1] has indicated an increasing usage of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) route selection for interAutonomous System (AS) Traffic Engineering (TE) in response to changes in network conditions [2] such as traffic load and link capacities. The objective of inter-AS outbound TE is to control the flow of traffic exiting an AS, through optimal BGP route selection [3], so as to optimize inter-AS TE objectives. Common inter-AS TE objectives are, for example, to satisfy inter-AS link capacity constraints, to achieve interAS traffic load balancing, and/or to minimize peering cost. The most common technique to implement inter-AS TE is by configuring routing protocol policies or metrics such as BGP local preferences (local-pref) and Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) link weights for hot-potato routing. In short, we call this BGP-based TE in this paper.