Traffic engineering in dynamic hybrid segment routing networks

Abstract

The emergence of Segment Routing (SR) provides a novel routing paradigm that uses a routing technique called source packet routing. In SR architecture, the paths that the packets choose to route on are indicated at the ingress router. Compared with shortest-path-based routing in traditional distributed routing protocols, SR can realize a flexible routing by implementing an arbitrary flow splitting at the ingress router. Despite the advantages of SR, it may be difficult to update the existing IP network to a full SR deployed network, for economical and technical reasons. Updating partial of the traditional IP network to the SR network, thus forming a hybrid SR network, is a preferable choice. For the traffic is dynamically changing in a daily time, in this paper, we propose aWeight Adjustment algorithmWASAR to optimize routing in a dynamic hybrid SR network. WASAR algorithm can be divided into three steps: firstly, representative Traffic Matrices (TMs) and the expected TM are obtained from the historical TMs through ultrascalable spectral clustering algorithm. Secondly, given the network topology, the initial network weight setting and the expected TM, we can realize the link weight optimization and SR node deployment optimization through a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm. Thirdly,we optimize the flow splitting ratios of SR nodes in a centralized online manner under dynamic traffic demands, in order to improve the network performance. In the evaluation, we exploit historical TMs to test the performance of the obtained routing configuration inWASAR. The extensive experimental results validate that our proposedWASAR algorithm has superior performance in reducingMaximum Link Utilization (MLU) under the dynamic traffic.