Traffic Aware Policy-based Internet Routing

Abstract

The Internet has changed and grown constantly since the first connections were established in 1969. This growth has required some compromises in the original technology to allow it to scale. Any router must be in an autonomous system, AS, which is a group of interconnected routers. The interconnection of these systems, rather than the individual routers, decides how BGP routes packets. Today's solution in BGP does not guarantee the best path is used, causing some performance and resource utilization losses.

This thesis shows that route optimization on the Internet with global perspective in an AS can improve performance and global routing by combining route information with topology and traffic pattern information.

The background and the problems are discussed. The design is presented of a linear programming implementation of a route optimization system, which reduces the problems in an AS. The developed prototype is capable of improving performance with limited undesired side effects.