SEMPER: A Stateless Traffic Engineering Solution based on MP-TCP for WAN networks

Abstract

Current Enterprise Networks deployments must accomplish a strong set of requirements in terms of resiliency, reliability and resources usage. As current approaches are based on monolithic and expensive infrastructures built on dedicated overlay links, vendors are trying to move to economical hybrid solutions that encompasses private dedicated links with public/regular Internet connections. However, these usually rely on complex Traffic Engineering solutions hardware dependent or proprietary that are costly in terms of computational time and memory usage in the forwarding nodes. In this paper, we propose SEMPER: a lightweight traffic engineering (TE) solution based on MP-TCP which, in contrast to other TE solutions, moves the complexity to the endpoints of the connection, and relieves the forwarding elements from complex operations or maintaining state. As our evaluation shows, SEMPER efficiently makes use of all available paths between the endpoints while maintaining fairness, and properly adapts to variations on the available capacity.