Internet Routing Architectures, Second Edition

Chapter 7. Redundancy, Symmetry, and Load Balancing

This chapter covers the following key topics:

• Redundancy— Building stability by providing alternate (default) routes in case of link failure is an important design goal of routing architecture.

• Setting default routes— Configuring default routes is the fundamental way to build redundancy into network connections. When multiple default routes exist, methods of ranking them by preference are needed.

• Symmetry— Configuring routes so that certain traffic enters and exits an AS at the same point is often a design goal of routing architecture.

• Load balancing— Dividing traffic over multiple links for optimal network perfomance

• Specific scenarios— Several representative network designs are ...