A traffic engineering approach based on minimum-delay routing

Abstract

Single-path routing provided by today's interior gateway protocols (IGP) make extremely inefficient usage of network bandwidth, and is evident in the large end-to-end delays flows experience in single-path routing as compared to minimum-delay routing. Enhancement to OSPF such as optimized multipath have not proved adequate to bridge this large delay gap. Practical implementations of minimum-delay routing, on the other hand, have been largely unsuccessful for reasons such as scalability, slow convergence and out-of-order packet delivery. This paper proposes a traffic engineering solution that adapts the minimum-delay routing for a given traffic matrix in a way that is practical and suitable to implement in the differentiated services framework. A simple and scalable packet forwarding technique is described that offers several improvements over OSPF-OMP.