Hierarchical traffic engineering based on model predictive control

Abstract

Traffic engineering (TE) plays an essential role in deciding routes that effectively use network resources. Since managing the routes of a large network takes a large overhead, multiple controllers are introduced in the network which hierarchically decide the routes. We call this approach hierarchical TE. In hierarchical TE, avoiding the route oscillation is a main problem since routes change at a layer causes the additional routes changes at other layers. The existing hierarchical TE avoids these route oscillation by setting the longer control interval on the upper layer. This approach, however, causes another problem that the routes change of upper layer delays to traffic changes. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical TE method called hierarchical model predictive traffic engineering (hierarchical MP-TE) which avoids routing oscillation without setting the long control interval. In hierarchical MP-TE, each control server gradually changes the routes based on the traffic prediction to stabilize the routing instead of setting the long control interval. Through the simulation, we show that the hierarchical MP-TE achieves the routing convergence with the short control interval.