TeaVaR: Striking the right utilization-availability balance in wan traffic engineering

Jeremy Bogle, Nikhil Bhatia, Manya Ghobadi, Ishai Menache, Nikolaj Bjørner, Asaf Valadarsky, Michael Schapira

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

86 Scopus citations

Abstract

To keep up with the continuous growth in demand, cloud providers spend millions of dollars augmenting the capacity of their widearea backbones and devote significant effort to efficiently utilizing WAN capacity. A key challenge is striking a good balance between network utilization and availability, as these are inherently at odds; a highly utilized network might not be able to withstand unexpected traffic shifts resulting from link/node failures. We advocate a novel approach to this challenge that draws inspiration from financial risk theory: leverage empirical data to generate a probabilistic model of network failures and maximize bandwidth allocation to network users subject to an operator-specified availability target. Our approach enables network operators to strike the utilizationavailability balance that best suits their goals and operational reality. We present TeaVaR (Traffic Engineering Applying Value at Risk), a system that realizes this risk management approach to traffic engineering (TE). We compare TeaVaR to state-of-the-art TE solutions through extensive simulations across many network topologies, failure scenarios, and traffic patterns, including benchmarks extrapolated from Microsoft's WAN. Our results show that with TeaVaR, operators can support up to twice as much throughput as state-ofthe- art TE schemes, at the same level of availability.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSIGCOMM 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages29-43
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781450359566
DOIs
StatePublished - 19 Aug 2019
Event50th Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2019 - Beijing, China
Duration: 19 Aug 201923 Aug 2019

Publication series

NameSIGCOMM 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

Conference

Conference50th Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2019
Country/TerritoryChina
CityBeijing
Period19/08/1923/08/19

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.

Keywords

  • Availability
  • Network optimization
  • Traffic engineering
  • Utilization

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