Efficient and robust routing of highly variable traffic

We consider the following issues related to robust network routing in a highly dynamic and changing traffic environment: What network routing should an Internet Service Provider use so as to (i) accommodate users demanding “good” service while being unpredictable in the traffic that they would like to send to different destinations, (ii) minimize the amount of “overprovisioning” that needs to be done in the network in order to make “best effort networking better” without resorting to sophisticated traffic prediction and management mechanisms, (iii) operate the network efficiently with mostly static routing configurations and without dynamic routing adjustments to avoid congestion due to drastic changes in traffic flows between a network’s ingress and egress routers. Achieving these goals has been difficult and has led to networks being very much overprovisioned in order to avoid the management complexity of implementing traffic management schemes that adapt network routing to changed traffic demands. In this paper, we propose a simple network routing scheme that is not much more complex to implement than shortest path routing with the following properties: (i) it effectively handles all traffic patterns permissible within the capacity constraints of ingress-egress links, (ii) it avoids congestion without requiring dynamic reconfiguration of routing parameters (such as link weights), and (ii) it is bandwidth efficient despite the ability to handle all traffic matrices. We argue that the routing scheme we propose is very effective in avoiding network congestion under extreme traffic variability while being static in the routing configuration and parsimonious in its “overprovisioning”.