Routing games for traffic engineering

Larroca, Federico - Rougier, Jean-Louis

Resumen:

Current data network scenario makes traffic engineering (TE) a very challenging task. The ever growing access rates and new applications running on end-hosts result in more variable and unpredictable traffic patterns. By providing origin-destination pairs with several possible paths, load-balancing has proved itself an excellent tool to face this uncertainty. In particular, mechanisms where routers greedily minimize a path cost function (thus requiring minimum coordination) have been studied from a game-theoretic perspective in what is known as a routing game (RG). The contribution of this paper is twofold. We first propose a new RG specifically designed for elastic traffic, where we maximize the total utility through load-balancing only. Secondly, we consider several important RGs from a TE perspective and, using several real topologies and traffic demands, present a thorough comparison of their performance. This paper brings insight into several RGs, which will help one in choosing an adequate dynamic load-balancing mechanism. The comparison shows that the performance gain of the proposed game can be important.


Detalles Bibliográficos
2009
Traffic Engineering
Routing games
Wardrop
Equilibrium
Load balancing
Telecomunicaciones
Inglés
Universidad de la República
COLIBRI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/38671
Acceso abierto
Licencia Creative Commons Atribución - No Comercial - Sin Derivadas (CC - By-NC-ND 4.0)
Resumen:
Sumario:Current data network scenario makes traffic engineering (TE) a very challenging task. The ever growing access rates and new applications running on end-hosts result in more variable and unpredictable traffic patterns. By providing origin-destination pairs with several possible paths, load-balancing has proved itself an excellent tool to face this uncertainty. In particular, mechanisms where routers greedily minimize a path cost function (thus requiring minimum coordination) have been studied from a game-theoretic perspective in what is known as a routing game (RG). The contribution of this paper is twofold. We first propose a new RG specifically designed for elastic traffic, where we maximize the total utility through load-balancing only. Secondly, we consider several important RGs from a TE perspective and, using several real topologies and traffic demands, present a thorough comparison of their performance. This paper brings insight into several RGs, which will help one in choosing an adequate dynamic load-balancing mechanism. The comparison shows that the performance gain of the proposed game can be important.