Traffic engineering is aimed at distributing traffic so as to "optimize" a given performance criterion. The ability to carry out such an optimal distribution depends on the routing protocol and the forwarding mechanisms in use in the network. In IP networks running the OSPF or IS-IS protocols, routing is along shortest paths, and forwarding mechanisms are constrained to distributing traffic uniformly over equal cost shortest paths. These constraints often make achieving an optimal distribution of traffic impossible.

In this talk, we seek operational feedback on an approach that is capable of realizing near optimal traffic distribution without any change to existing routing protocols and forwarding mechanisms. We also explore the trade-off that exists between performance and the overhead associated with the additional configuration steps that our solution requires. The presentations's contributions are in formulating and evaluating an approach to traffic engineering for existing IP networks that achieves performance levels comparable to that offered when deploying other forwarding technologies such as MPLS.

About the Presenters
Ashwin Sridharan obtained his Bachelor's in Electronics Engineering from Regional Engineering College, Nagpur, India, in June 1997, and his Masters in Telecommunication from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore in December 1998. Currently, he is a graduate student in Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, working in the area of IP networking under Dr. Roch Guerin. His main area of focus is the utilization of traffic engineering information to improve performance of existing routing protocols.

Roch Guerin holds an engineer degree from ENST, Paris, France, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in EE from Caltech. He joined the Electrical and System Engineering department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1998 as the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunications Networks. He is currently on part-time leave from Penn at Ipsum Networks, a startup company he co-founded in 2001, which is developing network management software for IP networks. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, he spent over twelve years at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in a variety of technical and management positions. Roch's research has been in the area of data networking and quality of service in packet networks, with a recent focus on routing and traffic engineering. He is an IEEE Fellow, and sits on the Scientific Advisory Board of France Telecom and on the Technical Advisory Board of Samsung Electronics.

Christophe Diot received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from INP Grenoble in 1991. From 1993 to 1998, he was a research scientist at INRIA Sophia Antipolis, working on new Internet architectures and protocols. Diot moved to Sprint Advanced Technology Laboratory in October 1998 to lead the IP research group. His current interest is in the passive monitoring of the Sprint IP backbone in order to study IP traffic characteristics and to design new analytical models and traffic engineering solutions for pure packet networks. Diot is a member of IEEE and ACM, and serves as an editor for ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking.