Providing effective inter-domain traffic engineering in the Internet

The Internet core is constantly expanding to meet the growing demands for bandwidth, doubling roughly every four to five months and overtaking core providers' ability to add infrastructure. The network topologies in the Internet core are designed to provide multiple differentiated paths between backbone nodes and the operators of each network participating in the Internet need to have as more control as possible over the flows of traffic entering and exiting from their administrative domain to achieve an optimal utilization of their inter-domain connectivity resources. This can be done with careful inter-domain routing engineering/control by enforcing local policies and setting-up traffic distribution agreements with neighboring networks. This paper address the challenges of using BGP-driven interdomain routing policies to control the flow of traffic in an efficient and predictable manner. Rather than proposing changes to the BGP protocol it investigates the best ways to support traffic engineering within the existing state-of-the-art BGP technology and illustrates practices and guidelines to provide a complete framework for effective inter-domain traffic engineering on the Internet.