Using Redistribution Communities for Interdomain Traffic Engineering

Various traffic engineering techniques have been proposed and are used to control the flow of IP packets inside large ISP networks. However, few techniques have been proposed to control the flow of packets between domains. In this paper, we focus on the needs of stub ISPs that compose 80% of the global Internet. We first describe the typical traffic pattern of such a stub ISP. Then we briefly describe the methods that those ISPs currently use to engineer their interdomain traffic. We focus on the control of the incoming traffic and show the increasing utilization of the BGP Community attribute and discuss the limitations of this approach. We then propose the redistribution communities as a deployable method to control the flow of the incoming interdomain traffic. We implement those redistribution communities in zebra and evaluate its performance.