SEMPER: a stateless traffic engineering solution for WAN based on MP-TCP

Abstract

Enterprise Networking has a strong set of requirements in terms of resiliency, reliability and resources usage. With current approaches being based on monolithic and expensive infrastructures using dedicated overlay links, providers are moving to more economical hybrid solutions that encompass private dedicated links with public/regular Internet connections. However, these usually rely on complex, hardware-dependent and/or proprietary Traffic Engineering (TE) solutions, which are computationally costly, in particular for the forwarding nodes. In this paper, we propose SEMPER: a lightweight TE solution based on MP-TCP that, in contrast to other TE solutions, moves the complexity to the endpoints of the connection, and relieves the forwarding elements from complex operations or even 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.