Traffic engineering with three-segments routing

Abstract

IEEE Segment Routing (SR) is a new fertile ground for Traffic Engineering (TE). By decomposing forwarding paths into segments, which specify a list of intermediate delivery points that a packet must visit on its way to the final destination, SR improves TE tasks and enables new solutions for the optimization of network resource utilization. This work proposes an Evolutionary Computation approach that enables Path Computation Element (PCE), or Software-defined Network (SDN) controllers, to optimize SR configurations for improved traffic distribution. Furthermore, we present a robust semi-oblivious method to address the variability of traffic requirements as well as alternative approaches to ensure a good network performance after link failures. In all cases, the optimization of network resource utilization is achieved using at the most three segments to configure each SR path. Moreover, all proposed optimization methods are made publicly available in a optimization framework developed by the authors.