Internet Traffic Engineering

Research Overview/Summary of Contributions:
My colleagues from Bell Laboratories and I have designed a suite of algorithms, popularly known as minimum-interference (restorable) routing algorithms (MIRA/MIRR), for efficient routing and traffic management in the Internet. In this project, we propose and evaluate the idea of choosing routes so that they minimize the ``interference’’ on other flows, or equivalently minimize the residual maxflows in the network. For both the cases of restorable [2] and non-restorable [1] routing, we have shown how the minimum-interference routes can be calculated, and how they can be approximated effectively at low computational complexity. We have demonstrated, through extensive evaluations, that our schemes significantly outperform existing min-hop or widest-shortest-path based routing mechanisms in the Internet. The papers we have written in this context have been very influential in the area of Internet traffic engineering, and have triggered a lot of subsequent research. Our basic paper on min-interference routing [1] has received 130+ citations, and has been discussed in detail in the textbook – Commnunication Networking: An Analytical Approach, by Kumar, Manjunath and Kuri. Our work on restorable min-interference routing [2] was adjudged Best Paper Award Finalist in the prestigious IEEE Infocom 2002 conference.

The key research papers on this topic are:

  1. K. Kar, M. Kodialam, T. V. Lakshman, Minimum Interference Routing of Bandwidth Guaranteed Tunnels with MPLS Traffic Engineering Applications, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. 18, No. 12, December 2000.
  2. K. Kar, M. Kodialam, T. V. Lakshman, Routing Restorable Bandwidth Guaranteed Connections Using Maximum 2-route Flows, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 11, No. 5, October 2003, pp. 772-781.

Other papers on this topic can be found on my full publication page.