Interdomain ingress traffic engineering through optimized AS-Path prepending

Abstract

In INterdomain Ingress Traffic Engineering (INITE), a "target" Autonomous System (AS) aims to control the ingress link at which the traffic of one or more upstream source networks enters that AS. In practice, ISPs often manipulate, mostly in a trial-and-error manner, the length of the AS-Path attribute of upstream routes through a simple technique known as prepending (or padding). In this paper, we focus on prepending and propose a polynomial-time algorithm (referred to as OPV) that determines the optimal padding for an advertised route at each ingress link of the target network. Specifically, given a set of "elephant" source networks and some maximum load constraints on the ingress links of the target AS, OPV determines the minimum padding at each ingress link so that the load constraints are met, when it is feasible to do so. OPV requires as input an AS-Path length estimate from each source network to each ingress link. We describe how to estimate this matrix, leveraging the BGP Looking Glass Servers. To deal with unavoidable inaccuracies in the AS-Path length estimates, and also to compensate for the generally unknown BGP tie-breaking process in upstream networks, we also develop a robust variation (RPV) of the OPV algorithm. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.