Method for tunable inter domain egress selection

A network method for use at a router at a point of ingress to an autonomous system of selecting a point of egress from the autonomous system comprising:

• a) identifying a plurality of possible points of egress for a point of ingress;
• b) establishing a tunnel from the point of ingress to a possible egress router;
• c) assigning an interior gateway protocol metric to the tunnel;
• and
• d) sending a data packet from the ingress router to a possible egress router according to the shortest metric,
• wherein the metric is across a plurality of destinations and respective possible points of egress from the autonomous system and the metric is m(i, p, e) equaling α(i, p, e)·d(G,i,e)+β(i, p, e) where α and β are configurable values, i, is the identity of the router, p is the destination, G is an undirected weighted graph, the d function is the interior gateway protocol distance and e is a point of egress.