Inbound interdomain traffic engineering with LISP

Stub autonomous systems usually utilize multiple links to single or multiple ISPs. Today, inbound traffic engineering is considered hard, as there is no direct way to influence routing decisions on remote systems with BGP. Current traffic engineering methods built on top of BGP are heuristic and time-consuming. The Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) promises to change that. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive evaluation of LISP and its built-in traffic engineering methods on a real-world testbed. First, we compare LISP to plain BGP and BGP advertising more specific prefixes. This comparison shows that LISP allows effective load-balancing with an accuracy of approximately 5%, while being easier to configure than BGP and its variants. Further experiments show that these results are independent from the number of concurrent streams.