Transcript ppt
On Multi-Path Routing
Aditya Akella
03/25/02
What is Multi-Path Routing?
Dynamically route traffic
Multiple paths to a destination
Path taken dependant on the relative load on
candidate paths at flow-arrival time
Help flows circumvent congested links
Load balancing, improved response time
Static routing
For example, OSPF
After route update, pick path P with least cost
All flows between the same source and
destination will follow P until the next update
picks a different path P’
Best candidate path information is stale for the
update period
Multi-path routing vs. Static
routing
Best candidate path of a flow is a function of
the network state when the flow arrives
Avoids staleness, in some sense
Keeping accurate network state at every
instant of time very tough
Multi-path routing uses estimated network state
Update estimated state at regular intervals
Past work and state-of-the-art
Plenty of related work (but, will mainly discuss
Shaikh and Rexford’s work)
Perform load-sensitive routing of long-lived IP flows
Statically route short lived flows
Applicable to backbone networks of ISPs
First hop router of a flow computes the path for the flow based on
knowledge of the entire network (the backbone)
Link State routing
Intra-AS solution
A different take on the problem
Multi-Path routing of IP flows
Existing solutions designed to work within the core of an
AS
Intra-AS
Aimed at achieving optimum provisioning of resources within an
AS
But the core is relatively under-utilized
Multi-path routing might only help make under-utilization
unifrom across an ISP
Greater congestion probably occurs at the edges of an AS
Queueing drops at Peering points
Edge of the network where stub networks attach
Might help more to do multi-path at inter-AS level
So… ?
Existing solutions should be extended to
work at a coarser level
Both Intra-AS and Inter-AS
How about designing a solution that works at
the Inter-AS level?
Focus of this work…
Can work in combination with an Intra-AS
solution
In this talk…
Explore the utility of employing multi-path
routing at AS-Level
What issues hinder the usefulness?
How can they be analyzed?
I will not present an actual mechanism…
How useful can this be?
(1) BGP
Potential multiple paths are hidden by BGP
Policy
E.g., Peer will not provide transit service
Path Vector as opposed link state
Only path length information
Need path cost information
Neighbor relations do not reveal number of paths
Neighbors could peer at many places
BGP contd.
How useful is Multi-Path Routing?
How much potential for Multi-Path Routing exists,
with BGP in its current form?
How much potential can we add and how?
Some factors just cannot be helped (some
policies)
What other factors can we get around?
How useful can this be?
(2) The Costs
The cost function
What is it, exactly?
How can it be computed in a distributed manner?
At what frequency to compute, update routes?
Etc…
How useful can this be?
(3) Selfish Routing
What if everybody employed Multi-Path Routing?
Each flow is now a selfish agent
Each flow tries to maximize its observed performance
What would be the marginal utility per flow when all
flows are selfish?
Nash Equilibrium
Cannot be better than the optimal case -When flows route packets in such a manner as to optimize a
common global metric – social equilibrium
Game-Theoretic Analysis
Game Theory
Will not bore you with the details. Here is an
outline
We have a game-theoretic model for multi-path routing
Have a way of showing how bad Nash equilibrium is
compared to social equilibrium
Have a link pricing mechanism that can be employed to
bridge the gap between Nash and social equilibria
Key idea: cheat by propagating link costs different from the true
costs
Greedy flows will try to minimize cost
Design cost in such a way that greedy flows actually end up
minimizing average cost (social optimum)
That’s about it!
Questions/Comments?