Improving the Interaction between Overlay Routing and Traffic Engineering

Overlay routing has been successful as an incremental method to improve Internet routing by allowing its own users to select their logical routing. In the meantime, traffic engineering (TE) are being used to reduce the whole network cost by adapting physical routing in response to varying traffic patterns. Previous studies [1, 2] have shown that the interaction of the two network components can cause huge network cost increases and oscillations. In this paper, we improve the interaction between overlay routing and TE by modifying the objectives of both parties. For the overlay part, we propose TE-awareness which limits the selfishness by some bounds so that the action of overlay does not offensively affect TE’s optimization process. Then, we suggest COPE [3] as a strong candidate that achieves close-to-optimal performance for predicted traffic matrices and that handles unpredictable overlay traffic efficiently. With extensive simulation results, we show the proposed methods can significantly improve the interaction with lower network cost and smaller oscillation problems.