Improving the Performance of Route Control Middleboxes in a Competitive Environment

摘要

Multihomed subscribers are increasingly adopting intelligent route control solutions\udto optimize the cost and end-to-end performance of the traffic routed among the\uddifferent links connecting their networks to the Internet. Until recently, IRC practices\udwere not considered adverse, but new studies show that in a competitive environment,\udthey can lead to persistent traffic oscillations, causing significant performance\uddegradation rather than improvements. To cope with this, randomized IRC techniques\udwere proposed. However, the proliferation of IRC products raises concerns,\udgiven that randomization becomes less effective as the number of interfering IRC\udsystems increases. In this article, we present a more scalable route control strategy\udthat can better support the foreseeable spread of IRC solutions. We show that by\udblending randomization with adaptive filtering techniques, it is possible to drastically\udreduce the interference between competing route controllers, and this can be\udachieved without penalizing the end-to-end traffic performance. In addition to the\udpotential improvements in terms of scalability and performance, the route control\udstrategy outlined here has various practical advantages. For instance, it does not\udrequire any kind of protocol or coordination between the competing IRC middleboxes,\udand it can be adopted readily today because the only requirement is a software\udupgrade of the available route controllers.