Experimental Demonstration of Segment Routing

Abstract

Segment routing (SR) technology has been recently proposed to enforce effective routing strategies without relying on signaling protocols. So far, the SR technology has received limited attention within the scientific community. In this paper, two SR implementations are presented and successfully demonstrated in two different network testbeds. The first implementation focuses on a software defined networking (SDN) scenario where nodes consist of OpenFlow switches and the SR controller is a specifically designed enhanced version of an OpenFlow controller. The second implementation includes a novel path computation element (PCE) scenario where nodes consist of commercially available IP/MPLS routers and the SR controller is a new extended version of a PCE solution. Both implementations have been successfully applied to demonstrate dynamic traffic rerouting. In particular, by enforcing different segment list configurations at the ingress node, rerouting is effectively achieved with no packet loss and without requiring the use of signaling protocols. Effective scalability performance is achieved in both proposed implementations, under different segment list conditions.