From the Traffic Properties to Traffic Engineering in the Internet

Due to concerns about resilience and performance, more and more stub networks in the Internet rely on multi-homing. Multi-homing consists in connecting a network to the Internet at different access points. As traffic leaves and enters the network through several access links, multi-homed networks need to control their traffic, also called traffic engineering. Multi-homed networks typically perform traffic engineering by tweaking the BGP routing protocol. The purpose of BGP is to distribute the information about reachable networks across the whole Internet, not to perform traffic engineering. It is thus important for multi-homed networks to know the complexity of traffic engineering with BGP. In this book, we explain how BGP can be used to engineer the traffic and what can be expected from doing it. The content of this book targets two types of readers. First, the network managers of small to medium-size stub networks will better understand BGP and how to use it to engineer their traffic. Second, researchers in networking will learn about three different research areas: Internet traffic characteristics, interdomain routing, and evolutionary optimization.