A Combined BGP and IP/MPLS Resilient Transit Backbone Design

Abstract

The Internet is a collection of interconnected Autonomous Systems (ASes) that use the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to exchange reachability information. The design of an optimal BGP overlay for an AS is a known NP-Hard problem this team tackled previously for IP networks, i.e, for the best effort paradigm. However, most Internet providers implement their backbones by combining IP routing with MPLS (Multipro- tocol Label Switching) for QoS-aware traffic forwarding. MPLS forwarding incorporates traffic engineering and more efficient failover mechanisms. The present work introduces a coordinated design of both IP/MPLS substrates. Our contribution is on proposing an optimal and yet resilient topology design for an IP/MPLS Internet backbone, which takes advantage of traffic engineering features to optimize the demands, maintaining the aforementioned iBGP overlay optimality.