Capacity-aware state aggregation for interdomain QoS routing

Quality-of-service (QoS) routing between domains is an essential component for providing service differentiation in the Internet. State aggregation is a technique that makes QoS routing scalable to large internetworks, by presenting a concise and accurate representation of the domain to the routing process. The concept of using a domain's routing capacity as a bandwidth aggregate has been in existence for some time. However, no methodology has been suggested in the literature for its estimation and usage. Also, the impact of a domain's routing capacity on the routing performance has not been studied before. This paper aims to fill these voids by presenting a framework based on "network flows" for estimating a domain's routing capacity and evaluating its efficacy on the routing performance. The routing capacity is used in conjunction with the conventional widest path bandwidth as the domain aggregate. Analytical and experimental results show that appropriate use of routing capacity along with the widest path bandwidth reduces the tendency of the advertised aggregate to overestimate bandwidth availability, and makes the routing process more robust to the frequency of domain state updates. During periods of congestion, the use of routing capacity can improve the bandwidth admitted into the network by as much as 20%