Optimal Deployment of SRv6 to Enable Network Interconnection Service

Many organizations nowadays have multiple sites at different geographic locations. Typically, transmitting massive data among these sites relies on the interconnection service offered by ISPs. Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6) is a new simple and flexible source routing solution which could be leveraged to enhance interconnection services. Compared to traditional technologies, e.g., physical leased lines and MPLS-VPN, SRv6 can easily enable quick-launched interconnection services and significantly benefit from traffic engineering with SRv6-TE. To parse the SRv6 packet headers, however, hardware support and upgrade are needed for the conventional routers of ISP. In this paper, we study the problem of SRv6 incremental deployment to provide a more balanced interconnection service from a traffic engineering view. We formally formulate the problem as an SRID problem with integer programming. After transforming the SRID problem into a graph model, we propose two greedy methods considering short-term and long-term impacts with reinforcement learning, namely GSI and GLI. The experiment results using a public dataset demonstrate that both GSI and GLI can significantly reduce the maximum link utilization, where GLI achieves a saving of 59.1% against the default method.