Towards decentralized and adaptive network resource management

Current practices for managing resources in fixed networks rely on off-line approaches, which can be sub-optimal in the face of changing or unpredicted traffic demand. To cope with the limitations of these off-line configurations new traffic engineering (TE) schemes that can adapt to network and traffic dynamics are required. In this paper, we propose an intra-domain dynamic TE system for IP networks. Our approach uses multi-topology routing as the underlying routing protocol to provide path diversity and supports adaptive resource management operations that dynamically adjust the volume of traffic sent across each topology. Re-configuration actions are performed in a coordinated fashion based on an in-network overlay of network entities without relying on a centralized management system. We analyze the performance of our approach using a realistic network topology, and our results show that the proposed scheme can achieve near-optimal network performance in terms of resource utilization in a responsive manner.