Centrality-based Middlepoint Selection for Traffic Engineering with Segment Routing

Abstract: Segment routing is an emerging technology to simplify traffic engineering implementation in WANs. It expresses an end-to-end logical path as a sequence of segments through a set of middlepoints. Traffic along each segment is routed along shortest paths. In this paper, we study practical traffic engineering (TE) with segment routing in SDN based WANs. We consider two common types of TE, and show that the TE problem can be solved in weakly polynomial time when the number of middlepoints is fixed and not part of the input. However, the corresponding linear program is of large scale and computationally expensive. For this reason, existing methods that work by taking each node as a candidate middlepoint are inefficient. Motivated by this, we propose to select just a few important nodes as middlepoints for all traffic. We use node centrality concepts from graph theory, notably group shortest path centrality, for middlepoint selection. Our performance evaluation using realistic topologies and traffic traces shows that a small percentage of the most central nodes can achieve good results with orders of magnitude lower runtime.