Latency-Aware Inter-domain Routing

TL;DR

This paper proposes modifications to BGP to make inter-domain routing latency-aware, aiming to reduce latency inflation and improve performance for latency-sensitive services like AR and cloud gaming.

Contribution

It introduces two novel BGP modifications—latency-proportional AS prepending and local preference neutralization—that enable latency-aware routing with manageable overhead.

Findings

Latency-aware BGP modifications can reduce routing latency.

Proposed methods show potential for practical deployment.

Routing overhead increases are reasonable.

Abstract

Despite efforts from cloud and content providers to lower latency to acceptable levels for current and future services (e.g., augmented reality or cloud gaming), there are still opportunities for improvement. A major reason that traffic engineering efforts are challenged to lower latency is that the Internet's inter-domain routing protocol, the Border Gateway Protocol, is oblivious to any performance metric, and circuitous routing is still pervasive. In this work, we propose two implementation modifications that networks can leverage to make BGP latency-aware and reduce excessive latency inflation. These proposals, latency-proportional AS prepending and local preference neutralization, show promise towards providing a method for propagating abstract latency information with a reasonable increase in routing overhead.