Alleviating cross-layer conflict between overlay routing and traffic engineering

Due to inevitable cross-layer conflict existing in route objectives of overlay routing and traffic engineering, the interaction between two selfish players causes network oscillations and routing performance loss. The interaction is investigated as a Nash routing game with best-reply, where two players have equal status, and take turn to optimize their routes. Overlay routing aims to minimize the total latency of all the overlay paths, while traffic engineering aims to minimize the maximum link utilization of the native network. We propose two simple, yet efficient strategies for overlay and native layers. The simulation results under various network conditions show that these two strategies help the interaction converge to an acceptable stable state in a short time and increase the stability of the whole network.