PhD defense of Rabah Guedrez on December 12th, 2018

The defense of PhD thesis of Rabah Guedrez will be held on December 12th at 09:00 at IMT Atlantique, Rennes Campus , Petit Amphi. The thesis is entitled “Enabling Traffic Engineering Over Segment Routing”. It was made in the framework of a CIFRE thesis with Orange Labs (Lannion).

Most major operators use MPLS technology to manage their network via signalling and label distribution protocols. However, these protocols are complex to deploy, maintain and troubleshooting is often very difficult. The IETF has initiated the standardization of a segment routing architecture based on a simple control plane, lightweight, easy-to-manage and instantiated on MPLS or IPv6. This architecture is based on the concept of source routing, in which the packet header carries the indications of the path to follow to reach its destination. Suitable for simple use cases and natively resistant to failure, more complex use cases require the resolution of technological issues for which we offer  several solutions. In this thesis carried out within Orange Labs, we were interested in the instantiation of the Segment Routing architecture on the MPLS transfer plan and more particularly in traffic engineering, particularly with resource reservation. We have proposed solutions to the problems related to the hardware limitation of current routers that do not allow the expression of all constrained paths. This work is divided into two parts: (i) the proposal of algorithms for computing and encoding segment routing paths in order to bypass hardware limitations. (ii) the definition of architectural requirements and the construction of a functional proof of concept. Finally, this thesis proposes new research issues to consolidate traffic engineering tools for segment routing.

Keywords :      Segment Routing, Ingénierie de trafic, Optimisations, IP/MPLS, SDN