[e2e] traffic engineering considered harmful

[Jonathan M. Smith]

Isn't this just active networking by another name?
                                                                         -JMS
At 05:20 PM 6/12/2001 -0400, David G. Andersen wrote:
>Jon Crowcroft just mooed:
> >
> > Why I think traffic engineering is a Bad Thing
> >       by jon crowcroft
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > 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)
>
>    I'll steal this topic as a chance for some blatant self-promotion:
>
>    Resilient Overlay Networks:    http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/ron/
>
>    Take a small collection of hosts around the 'Net.  They
>can see different paths in and out of various ASs.  Have them
>measure the paths between each other, and if they can establish
>a better route by sending their packets indirectly through another
>member of the overlay, do so.
>
>    It's a rough approximation of the ideal that you're alluding to
>in your message, since it has the obvious downsides of needing to
>go all the way to the edge and then back in, and it's limited in its
>view of the available paths, but it's one way to start doing some
>of the things you're looking at.  Works pretty well, too, especially
>in the face of a few egregiously bad links.
>
>    -Dave
>
>--
>work: dga at lcs.mit.edu                          me:  dga at pobox.com
>       MIT Laboratory for Computer Science           http://www.angio.net/