Capacity-balanced alternate routing for MPLS traffic engineering

Abstract

This paper solves the problem of path selection for connection-oriented MPLS-based mesh networks with a special focus on implementation issues in middle-sized networks, such as metropolitan-area networks (MANs). A novel network planning algorithm, called capacity-balanced alternate routing (C-BAR), is proposed. For C-BAR, alternate paths between each ingress-egress pair are defined at a network planning stage according to the network topology and potential traffic load and location of each ingress-egress pair so that load-balancing can be achieved in routing label switched paths (LSPs). Both analytical and simulation-based studies have been conducted to examine the proposed approach. The results show that the C-BAR algorithm can significantly improve the performance in blocking probability by spreading potential traffic to the whole network compared with other reported connection-oriented routing schemes.