Load balancing inbound traffic in multihomed stub autonomous systems

Abstract

In the Internet, with many competing networks each trying to optimise its own bandwidth, a stub network has limited knowledge about user demands, available network resources and routing policies of other networks. This uncertainty makes the task of interdomain traffic engineering for a stub network very challenging. The basic aim of a stub network connected to multiple ISPs (multihomed) is to load balance its traffic among its various edge links. Our goal in this work is to distribute the incoming traffic of a multihomed stub network among its various edge links. The focus is on networks that primarily download traffic from the Internet. Regulating the incoming traffic is difficult since it will require to influence the behaviour of the remote destinations. We performed a systematic analysis of our problem and showed that even a restricted instance of the problem is NP-complete. We proposed simple, low-cost route control techniques to load balance traffic by reallocating the routes of outgoing traffic. The techniques were validated using synthetic as well as actual data collected under numerous traffic load conditions. Results show that we can achieve significant improvement in load balancing with minimum traffic re-assignments. Moreover, the proposed techniques neither require any third party assistance nor changes to existing protocols and network setup. This makes our schemes easily deployable in real networks.