Traffic Engineering with Segment Routing: SDN-based Architectural Design and Open Source Implementation

TL;DR

This paper presents an SDN-based architecture for traffic engineering using Segment Routing, including an open source implementation and experimental evaluation of a flow allocation heuristic.

Contribution

It introduces a novel architecture combining SDN and Segment Routing for traffic engineering, with an open source reference implementation and heuristic evaluation.

Findings

The proposed architecture simplifies route enforcement in TE.

Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the heuristic.

Open source implementation facilitates adoption and further research.

Abstract

Traffic Engineering (TE) in IP carrier networks is one of the functions that can benefit from the Software Defined Networking paradigm. By logically centralizing the control of the network, it is possible to "program" per-flow routing based on TE goals. Traditional per-flow routing requires a direct interaction between the SDN controller and each node that is involved in the traffic paths. Depending on the granularity and on the temporal properties of the flows, this can lead to scalability issues for the amount of routing state that needs to be maintained in core network nodes and for the required configuration traffic. On the other hand, Segment Routing (SR) is an emerging approach to routing that may simplify the route enforcement delegating all the configuration and per-flow state at the border of the network. In this work we propose an architecture that integrates the SDN paradigm with SR-based TE, for which we have provided an open source reference implementation. We have designed and implemented a simple TE/SR heuristic for flow allocation and we show and discuss experimental results.