RedTE: Mitigating Subsecond Traffic Bursts with Real-time and Distributed Traffic Engineering

Internet traffic bursts usually happen within a second, thus conventional burst mitigation methods ignore the potential of Traffic Engineering (TE). However, our experiments indicate that a TE system, with a sub-second control loop latency, can effectively alleviate burst-induced congestion. TE-based methods can leverage network-wide tunnel-level information to make globally informed decisions (e.g., balancing traffic bursts among multiple paths). Our insight in reducing control loop latency is to let each router make local TE decisions, but this introduces the key challenge of minimizing performance loss compared to centralized TE systems.