Acar: An application-aware network routing system using SRv6

Abstract

The optimal path varies depending on the communication characteristics of each application. However, existing routing protocols such as BGP and OSPF do not take this fact into account. Although Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been considered as a possible solution to this problem, SDN technologies relying on a centralized controller has scalability issues. SRv6, which is a source routing protocol that enables SDN, handles routing decisions in a decentralized manner and is expected to scale better than previous SDN technologies.This paper proposes Acar, an adaptive routing system using SRv6 that adaptively controls routing by considering the bandwidth requirements of applications and the link utilization of the network. We conducted experiments on a virtual network and demonstrated that Acar achieves better load balancing between links and higher throughput compared to ECMP.