Traffic Engineering: From ISP to Cloud Wide Area Networks

Abstract

We conduct a systematic review of two decades of work on wide-area network traffic engineering (TE). We summarize the contributions of important TE algorithms and systems developed for Internet Service Provider and cloud wide-area networks. We study the evolution of the goals of TE (from performance to reliability), TE system design (from decentralized to fully-centralized to partly-centralized) and the technology used in deploying these systems in large commercial networks (from vendor-specific protocols to software-defined implementations). We define a taxonomy of TE systems to categorize developments in TE research. We identify trends at the forefront of TE research and practice to motivate an agenda for future work in this area. Finally, to aid future work, we are releasing our summaries and implementations of several recent TE algorithms.1.