Reducing Latency in African NRENS Using Performance-Based LISP/SDN Traffic Engineering
Josiah Chavula, Melissa Densmore, Hussein Suleman · 2015
Active topology measurements on the African Internet have showed that over 75% of the intra-Africa traffic destined for Africa's National Research and Education Net-works (NRENs) uses intercontinental links, resulting in high latencies and data transmission costs. The goal of this work is to investigate how latency-based path selection using Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) in NRENs can be used to reduce inter-NREN latencies. We present aspects of an experimental prototype implementation for realtime topology probes to discover lower-latency remote gateways and dynamic configuration of end-to-end Internet paths. Simulation results indicate that ranking remote ingress gateways, and dynamic configuration of end-to-end paths between gateways can lower the average latency for inter-NREN traffic exchange.