  Traffic Engineering (TE) in IP carrier networks is one of the functions that
can benefit from the Software Defined Networking paradigm. By logically
centralizing the control of the network, it is possible to "program" per-flow
routing based on TE goals. Traditional per-flow routing requires a direct
interaction between the SDN controller and each node that is involved in the
traffic paths. Depending on the granularity and on the temporal properties of
the flows, this can lead to scalability issues for the amount of routing state
that needs to be maintained in core network nodes and for the required
configuration traffic. On the other hand, Segment Routing (SR) is an emerging
approach to routing that may simplify the route enforcement delegating all the
configuration and per-flow state at the border of the network. In this work we
propose an architecture that integrates the SDN paradigm with SR-based TE, for
which we have provided an open source reference implementation. We have
designed and implemented a simple TE/SR heuristic for flow allocation and we
show and discuss experimental results.
