[e2e] traffic engineering considered harmful

[Jon Crowcroft]

so here's a new topic

Why I think traffic engineering is a Bad Thing
	by jon crowcroft

I think traffic engineering is a Bad Thing
because it is only a good thing for ISPs. 
traffic engineering is about maximising utilsiation of 
your resources - whether its fiddling with MPLS FEC or
hacking the metrics in OSPF, what you're trying to do is post hoc
rationalisation.

what would be better? what would be better would be to give the users
a choice - if loose source routing (or strict, or scalelble
multihoming, or IPv6 GSE) worked well, then users would choose the
best path for their traffic. if a user who sees a poor packet loss
(or ECN marking) rate on path a can try a different path, then a market 
in alternate paths would develope - this would obviate the need for
traffic engineering, and would make it an end2end selection (hence why
i am posting this here)

What's hard about this? routers. why is it hard. well, only coz we
havnt thought about optimising them for it - fact is it oughta be easy
coz they have LESS decision to make if we do this, since we take the
decision out of their silicon paws and puit it into the C-shape hands
of end system software....

thats what i think....but only for the next 3 nanoseconds...

chrz


jon