Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Large scientific data transfers often occur at high rates causing increased burstiness in Internet traffic. To limit the adverse effects of these high-rate large-sized flows, which are referred to as $$\alpha $$α flows, on delay-sensitive audio/video flows, a network management system called Alpha Flow Traffic Engineering System (AFTES) is proposed for intra-domain traffic engineering. An offline approach is used in which AFTES analyzes NetFlow records collected by routers, extracts source–destination address prefixes of $$\alpha $$α flows, and uses these prefixes to configure firewall filters at ingress routers of a provider’s network to redirect future $$\alpha $$α flows to traffic-engineered paths and isolated queues. The effectiveness of this scheme was evaluated through an analysis of 7 months of NetFlow data obtained from an ESnet router. For this data set, 91 % of bytes generated by $$\alpha $$α flows during high-rate intervals would have been directed had AFTES been deployed. The negative aspect of using address prefixes in firewall filters, i.e., the redirection of $$\beta $$β flows to $$\alpha $$α-flow paths/queues, was also quantified.