Level: intermediate
The Internet is a mesh of interconnected networks, each striving to control its network operating costs, optimize end-to-end performance for customers, and differentiate its IP services from those of competing providers. Increasingly, a provider's success will be determined by its ability to monitor and engineer its inter-domain traffic performance.

Traditional traffic engineering (TE) techniques focus on intra-domain control features, particularly those associated with multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) within an infrastructure. Newer traffic monitoring and analysis solutions are supporting collection and correlation of multiple network metrics, specifically, inter-domain routing, traffic and path performance data. The emerging traffic engineering systems are oriented toward goals of optimizing network performance while controlling costs associated with operations at the edges of networks, i.e., the points where traffic is exchanged with other networks.

This tutorial provides an overview of techniques that can be used by networks to expand visibility into and control of traffic moving between their network and other domains. The focus is on analysis methodologies and case examples of how inter-domain TE can be used by networks to support cost-effective peering analysis and planning for new capacity and services, as well as real-time routing and traffic management.

About the Presenters
Josh Wepman is an applications engineer at Ixia, defining applications for the IxTraffic traffic engineering product. Josh was a senior engineer at Caimis, Inc., responsible for BGP routing and traffic (flow) analyses and for design of several traffic engineering applications. Previously, he served as a backbone engineer at UUNET, managing intra-domain routing and traffic engineering efforts.

Joe Abley is a toolmaker at MFN, building tools to measure, manage and document MFN's IP network; he has also worked at MFN as a backbone engineer. Before joining MFN, Joe worked as a consultant for various carriers and ISPs in New Zealand, where he provided operational and network design support for regional IP networks.