Integrated, Distributed Traffic Control in Multidomain Networks

In this paper, we put forward an integrated traffic control structure and the associated control laws for multidomain networks. This control structure performs per-edge-to-edge-based multinext-hop or multipath rate adaptation and load balancing among domain edge nodes in a multidomain network. This control structure is underpinned by a large family of distributed control laws, with provable convergence and optimality properties. With any user-defined global design objective, a set of control laws can be selected from this family of control laws that track an operational point where the global design objective is achieved, while providing traffic engineering (TE) and fast failure recovery (FFR) features for class-of-service (CoS)-aware flow aggregates. The structure allows the user to have full control over how the domains should be created and whether to use point-to-multipoint and/or point-to-point multipath. The flexibility and versatility of the control structure makes it an ideal theoretical underpinning for the development of integrated traffic control solutions for large-scale networking systems, in particular, software-defined networks in which the data plane is fully programmable via a well-defined south-bound interface, such as OpenFlow. The simulation testing demonstrates the viability of the solution in providing TE, FFR, and CoS features.