Alibaba Edge Network Traffic Optimization for Double 11: NetO System and BGP/SDN Strategies

The Double 11 shopping festival, which started in 2009, has seen rapidly increasing transaction volumes each year, reflecting users' high expectations for access experience.

The network team has been dedicated to improving user access experience. Double 11 users are worldwide, and Alibaba's internal backbone network also spans the globe, providing services to global users through the Internet formed by operators worldwide. To this end, Alibaba's network engineers have built the Alibaba Intelligent Traffic Scheduling (NetO) system to ensure a silky‑smooth user experience. Let's explore how it works.

Optimizing the inbound path for user access to Alibaba

Alibaba has deployed an Internet Quality Analysis system that monitors internet quality in real time and assigns users the nearest Alibaba network entry point, allowing users to connect to Alibaba services as quickly as possible. In addition, Alibaba continuously expands peering with small and medium operators and adds service points in hotspot regions to improve user experience.

Optimizing Alibaba's outbound path for users (based on multi‑operator BGP egress scheduling)

Today's Internet is based on the BGP routing protocol, but BGP's best‑path selection is neither network‑capacity‑aware nor performance‑aware, as it cannot reflect actual link traffic, utilization, latency, or packet loss.

Alibaba combines SDN and BGP to optimize its Edge Network and improve user experience: it monitors operator egress link capacity, utilization, and performance, and integrates multi‑dimensional quality data from the Internet and Alibaba's internal backbone. From a global view, it simulates traffic, calculates the best operator egress for each region, then the SDN controller issues scheduling commands to agents that implement the outbound path scheduling.

BGP egress intelligent smooth switching across regions

Alibaba works closely with many operators, establishing a broad BGP interconnection ecosystem, building a hierarchical routing deployment system and refining precise automatic switching technology. When an operator's access network in a region experiences an anomaly, Alibaba quickly detects it and intelligently switches BGP egress, bypassing the faulty internet region smoothly, with users barely noticing.

Conclusion

Alibaba Edge Network, as one of the company's core competitive advantages, continuously focuses on enhancing connectivity and user capability. Through the Alibaba Intelligent Traffic Scheduling (NetO) system, Alibaba delivers its services to users with the best quality and stability, providing an optimal user experience.