Analysis of MPLS traffic engineering

As recent history tells us, the upper limit of transmittable bandwidth doubles and sometimes quadruples every nine to twelve months. Already transmission of tens of tera bits-per-second over a single optical fiber is possible and matching data transferring topologies as well as improved system reliability are currently needed. Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) has been emerging as the protocol of the future due to it's true "multiprotocol architecture" where it utilizes a simple label switching mechanism and provides quality of service (QoS) features through traffic engineering. Additionally, MPLS provides a solution to scalability and enables significant flexibility in routing. Also, it can easily enable high quality end-to-end service features that are necessary in applications such as virtual private networks (VPN). These benefits of MPLS networking are made possible through traffic engineering. Currently, the constraint-based routing label distribution protocol (CR-LDP) and the resource reservation protocol (RSVP) are the signaling algorithms used for traffic engineering. In this paper, we investigate the signaling procedures of the CR-LDP and RSVP algorithms and discuss the appropriateness of the applications in MPLS traffic engineering networks. In conclusion, based on network reliability and QoS reservation capabilities, CR-LDP was determined to be superior to RSVP signaling. Additionally, the extensions proposed to RSVP signaling are also discussed and analyzed in this paper.