Hello NANOG, Jennifer Rexford, Jay Borkenhagen and I have been working on developing useful traffic engineering techniques for network operators (like yourselves). Specifically, we've been trying to show how network operators can tune traffic on outbound links using BGP import policies while minimizing network instability. Since the paper we've been working on really is about how to make your lives easier, we would very much appreciate your comments on the work. We'd also enjoy learning about other types of tricks that network operators play to tune traffic flows. http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/~feamster/papers/att-tm01.{ps,pdf} Thanks! Nick ########## Nick Feamster, Jay Borkenhagen, and Jennifer Rexford, "Controlling the impact of BGP policy changes on IP traffic," AT&T Research Technical Report 011106-02, November 2001. Abstract: The Internet consists of nearly 12,000 autonomous systems (AS's) that exchange routing information using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). The operators of each network need to have control over the flow of traffic through the AS. However, BGP does not facilitate common traffic engineering tasks, such as balancing load across multiple links to a neighboring AS or directing traffic to a different neighbor. Solving these problems is difficult because the number of possible changes to routing policies is too large to exhaustively test all possibilities, some changes in routing policy can have an unpredictable effect on the flow of traffic, and the BGP decision process implemented by router vendors limits an operator's control over path selection.