Network performance monitoring within MPLS traffic engineering enabled networks

Abstract

Robust growth in connectivity demand, pressure to increase service availability and quality, as well as continuous innovation in devices and services are trends facing the telecommunications industry. Today's customers are demanding and prone to changing the service provider. Meeting or exceeding customer expectations is a major and growing challenge across the industry. Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology in the core network provides multiservice support and high performance by load-sharing traffic over redundant core links. It offers flexibility and scalability. The introduction of mechanisms for raising the level of network availability has turned MPLS network monitoring into a challenging task. In this paper, we propose an algorithm which ensures real-time tunnel performance monitoring in MPLS networks with Traffic Engineering, giving the operator detailed insight into the network operation, and thus providing the ability to evaluate network performance and simplify troubleshooting. The proposed algorithm measures and collects jitter, delay, packet loss, bandwidth usage and Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) values for each MPLS TE tunnel.