Publication Details: UM-CS-2010-012

Beyond MLU: An Application-Centric Comparison of Traffic Engineering Schemes

Publication Type:Technical Report
Author(s):A. Sharma, A. K. Mishra, V. Kumar, A. Venkataramani
Abstract:In this work, we revisit the traffic engineering (TE) problem focusing on user-perceived application performance, an aspect that has largely been ignored in prior work. Using real traffic matrices and topologies from three ISPs, we conduct very large-scale experiments simulating ISP traffic as an aggregate of a large number of TCP flows. Our application-centric, empirical approach yields two rather unexpected findings. First, link utilization metrics, and MLU in particular, are poor predictors of application performance. Despite significant differences in MLU, all TE schemes and even a static shortest-path routing scheme achieve nearly identical application performance. Second, application adaptation in the form of location diversity, i.e., the ability to download content from multiple potential locations, significantly impacts TE. Even the ability to download from just 2--4 locations enables all TE schemes to achieve near-optimal capacity, and static routing to be within 30% of optimal. Our findings call into question the value of TE as practiced today, and compel us to significantly rethink the TE problem in the light of application adaptation.
Document: [AVAILABLE HERE]
Submitted on:2010-02-08