Transcript ppt

On Multi-Path Routing
Aditya Akella
03/25/02
What is Multi-Path Routing?
 Dynamically route traffic
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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
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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
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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)
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Perform load-sensitive routing of long-lived IP flows
Statically route short lived flows
Applicable to backbone networks of ISPs
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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
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Intra-AS
Aimed at achieving optimum provisioning of resources within an
AS
But the core is relatively under-utilized
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Multi-path routing might only help make under-utilization
unifrom across an ISP
 Greater congestion probably occurs at the edges of an AS
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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
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Both Intra-AS and Inter-AS
 How about designing a solution that works at
the Inter-AS level?
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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
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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
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E.g., Peer will not provide transit service
Path Vector as opposed link state
Only path length information
 Need path cost information
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Neighbor relations do not reveal number of paths
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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
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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?
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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
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Game Theory
 Will not bore you with the details. Here is an
outline
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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
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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?