Enabling Application-Aware Traffic Engineering in IPv6 Networks

The Internet hosts numerous applications with different requirements for network delay, bandwidth, jitter, packet loss, and so on. However, in the TCP/IP network architecture, the network and application layers are decoupled, which means that the network does not have a fine-grained understanding of the application requirements. Therefore, it is not easy to provide truly fine-grained traffic operations for applications and guarantee their corresponding service level agreement requirements. In this article, we propose ATE6, which is an application-aware traffic engineering (TE) framework. For the control plane, we define a request language that can be used by applications to express their requirements, which allows networks to associate IPv6 addresses with the communication requirements of applications. We also devise an efficient path selection algorithm that allows the network operator to deploy an optimal TE path for an application. For the data plane, ATE6 uses segment routing over the IPv6 data plane to enforce and control network paths based on network policies. We implemented a prototype, and evaluation results show that ATE6 is a flexible, privacy-preserving, lightweight, and cost-efficient application-aware TE framework.