Routing Games for Traffic Engineering

Abstract--Current data network scenario makes Traffic Engineering (TE) a very challenging task. The ever growing access rates and new applications running on end-hosts result in more variable and unpredictable traffic patterns. By providing origindestination pairs with several possible paths, load-balancing has proved itself an excellent tool to face this uncertainty. In particular, mechanisms where routers greedily minimize a path cost function (thus requiring minimum coordination) have been studied from a game-theoretic perspective in what is known as a Routing Game (RG). The contribution of this paper is twofold. We first propose a new RG specifically designed for elastic traffic, where we maximize the total utility through load-balancing only. Secondly, we consider several important RGs from a TE perspective and, using several real topologies and traffic demands, present a thorough comparison of their performance. This paper brings insight into several RGs, which will help one in c...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICC
• Authors: Federico Larroca, Jean-Louis Rougier
• Keywords: Adequate Dynamic Load-balancing, Communications, Data Network Scenario, ICC 2009, Unpredictable Traffic Patterns