An efficient traffic engineering approach based on flow distribution and splitting in MPLS networks

Abstract

This paper develops an efficient method based on traffic flow distribution and splitting for traffic engineering in the MPLS networks. We define flow distribution as selecting one of the available label switch paths (LSPs) to carry one aggregated traffic flow. Flow splitting is, however, the mechanism designed for multiple parallel LSPs to share one single aggregated flow. Our studies show that flow distribution and flow splitting approaches readily solve the routing problems such as bottleneck and mismatch problems. An algorithm based on network bandwidth utilization is also proposed to integrate both approaches. The simulation results presented at the end of the paper demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.