NetworkAPI: An In-Band Signalling Application-Aware Traffic Engineering Using SRv6 and IP Anycast

Abstract

Application-aware Traffic Engineering (TE) plays a crucial role in ensuring quality of services (QoS) for recently emerging applications such as AR, VR, cloud gaming, and connected vehicles. While a deterministic application-aware TE is required for these mission-critical applications, a negotiation procedure between applications and network operators needs to undergo major simplification to fulfill the scalability of the application based on emerging microservices and container-based architecture. In this paper, we propose a NetworkAPI framework which allows an application to indicate a desired TE behavior inside IP packets by leveraging Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6). In the NetworkAPI framework, the TE behavior provided by the network operator is expressed as an SRv6 Segment Identifier (SID) in the form of a 128-bit IPv6 address. Because the IPv6 address of an SRv6 SID is distributed using IP anycast, the application can utilize the unchanged SRv6 SID regardless of the application's location, as if the application controls an API on the transport network. We implement a prototype of the NetworkAPI framework on a Linux kernel. On the prototype implementation, a basic packet forwarding performance is evaluated to demonstrate the feasibility of our framework.