Abstract

Abstract — In the Internet today, traffic engineering is performed assuming that the offered traffic is inelastic. In reality, end hosts adapt their sending rates to network congestion, and network operators adapt the routing to the measured traffic. This raises the question of whether the joint system of congestion control (transport layer) and routing (network layer) is stable and optimal. Using the established optimization model for TCP and that for traffic engineering as a basis, we find the joint system is stable and typically maximizes aggregate user utility, especially under more homogeneous link capacities. We prove that both stability and optimality of the joint system can be guaranteed for sufficiently elastic traffic simply by tuning the cost function used for traffic engineering. Then, we present a new algorithm that adapts on a faster timescale to changes in traffic distribution and is more robust to large traffic bursts. Uniting the network and transport layers in a multi-layer approach, this algorithm, Distributed Adaptive Traffic Engineering (DATE), jointly optimizes the goals of end users and network operators and reacts quickly to avoid bottlenecks. Simulations demonstrate that DATE converges quickly.

Citations