Application of the theory of the multicommodity for the flows distribution in MPLS networks

Abstract

Multicommodity network flows models are computationally challenging due to the large dimension of real instances, as those from the fields of telecommunications specifically in multiprotocol label switching (MPLS). MPLS extends the IP destination based routing protocols to provide a new and scalable routing capabilities in connectionless networks using a relatively simple packet forwarding mechanism. MPLS networks carry traffic on virtual connections called label switched path (LSP). This paper considers the distributed D-LSP mechanism, each sub-LSP is set up on a different node-disjoint route. We propose an analytical method that allows minimizing the spare bandwidth using the optimization multicommodity flows technique, specifically applying the reformulation with path flows. The results show that there is an optimization of the spare bandwidth with distributed LSP mechanism in comparison with conventional LSP.