Inter-domain router placement and traffic engineering

The Internet is organized as an interconnection of separate administrative domains called autonomous systems (ASs). The border gateway protocol (BGP) is the de facto standard for controlling the routing of traffic across different ASs. It supports scalable distribution of reachability and routing policy information among different ASs. In this paper, we study a network design problem which determines (1) the optimal placement of border router(s) within a domain and (2) the corresponding inter- and intra-domain traffic patterns within an AS. Practical constraints imposed by BGP and other standard shortest-path-based intra-domain routing protocols are considered. The problem is formulated as a variant of the uncapacitated network design problem (UNDP). While it is feasible to use a brute-force, integer-programming-based approach for tackling small instances of this problem, we have resorted to a dual-ascent approximation approach for mid/large-scale instances. The quality of the approximation approach is evaluated in terms of its computational efficiency and network cost sub-optimality. Sensitivity analysis w.r.t. various network/traffic parameters are also conducted. We then describe how one can apply our optimization results to better configure BGP as well as other intra-domain routing protocols. This serves as a first-step towards the auto-configuration of Internet routing protocols, BGP in particular, which is "well-known" for its tedious and error-prone configuration needs.