Nowadays, network applications are developing toward refined management. For example, a user expects to control particular traffic in a specified time period. In an example, to ensure reliable bandwidth of video transmission in prime time at night, a network operator expects to limit data traffic of a common user who uses an Internet access service and does not limit data traffic in other time periods. To achieve this objective, a service traffic control policy that is effective in limited time needs to be deployed.
An effective time period of service traffic may be controlled by deploying an access control list (ACL) rule on a router. However, in a multi-router application scenario, an ACL rule needs to be deployed on each router. Configuration processes are complex and error-prone. Especially, all routers at a network edge need to take a joint action (such as in an anti-distributed denial of service (Anti-DDOS) attack scenario) in some service traffic control scenarios. This further increases configuration workload.
Furthermore, existing routing protocols do not support a limited-time effective feature. For example, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a dynamic routing protocol between autonomous systems (ASs), and supports dissemination of Internet Protocol (IP) routes, virtual private network (VPN) routes, and the BGP Flow Specification (FlowSpec). The BGP does not support setting of an effective time period, and cannot implement a joint action (such as synchronously becoming effective, and becoming invalid during idle time) of multiple routers in a network. Therefore, the existing routing protocols cannot meet a limited-time effective requirement for the traffic control policy.