Multitopology Routing With Virtual Topologies and Segment Routing

Multitopology routing (MTR) provides an attractive alternative to segment routing (SR) for traffic engineering when network devices cannot be upgraded. However, due to a high overhead in terms of link state messages exchanged by topologies and the need to frequently update link weights to follow evolving network conditions, MTR is often limited to a small number of topologies and the satisfaction of loose QoS constraints. To overcome these limitations, we propose virtual MTR (vMTR), an MTR extension where demands are routed over virtual topologies that are silent; that is, they do not exchange LSA messages and that are continuously derived from a very limited set of real topologies, optimizing each QoS parameter. In this context, we present a polynomial and exact algorithm for vMTR and, as a benchmark, a local search algorithm for MTR. We show that vMTR helps to reduce drastically the number of real topologies and that it is more robust to QoS changes. In the case where SR can actually be rolled‐out, we also show that vMTR allows to drastically reduce SR overhead.