V.A. Clincy and N. Abu-Halaweh (USA)
MPLS, Traffic Engineering, Network Congestion, Router Delay, Simulation
In today’s networking environment, very high resource demand applications exist. These applications generate tremendous amounts of network traffic, require a considerable amount of network bandwidth and a certain quality of service, to operate correctly and efficiently, i.e. a specific degree of network performance. In some types of applications, traffic delays are not acceptable. Network performance is one of the most important issues in the networking environment. Congested network segments or nodes highly degrade performance and affect network applications. Multi Protocol Layer Switching (MPLS) is one of the most recent approaches in dealing with congestion and improving network performance. MPLS enhances packet-forwarding speed across MPLS-enabled nodes and enables traffic rerouting across non-utilized links. With MPLS, rather than performing layer-3 lookup at each router across the network, layer-2 switching is used in reducing the time needed by a router in forwarding packets. Traffic engineering is one of the major strengths of MPLS. With traffic engineering, traffic can be forwarded along predefined paths consisting of non-utilized links. The following simulation study is an effort to quantitatively illustrate the benefit of using MPLS in solving congestion problems in a heavy traffic environment. This study illustrates how MPLS contributes to solving congestion caused by overloaded network links. This study also shows how MPLS can improve end to end delay by speeding up router forwarding capability. Lastly, this study illustrates how a traffic-engineering approach, supported by MPLS, contributes to solving congestion problems caused by overloaded network segments by utilizing non-utilized links. A comparative analysis is provided for 1) a non MPLS enabled network and 2) a MPLS enabled network.
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