Traffic Engineering with Constraint Based Routing in MPLS Networks

In today's set-vice provider networks MPLS Traffic Engineering (MPLS TE) is one of the fastest growing implementation. MPLS adoption in service provider networks has increased manifold due to its inherent TE capabilities. A purpose of traffic engineering in a network is to setting lip paths between the edge nodes of the network to meet traffic demands while optimizing network performance. It is known that total traffic throughput in a network, or resource utilization, can be maximized if a traffic demand is split over multiple paths. MPLS networks can use native TE mechanisms to minimize network congestion and improve network performance. TE modifies routing patterns to provide efficient mapping of traffic streams to network resources. This efficient mapping can reduce the occurrence of congestion and can play an important role in the implementation of network services with quality of service (QoS) guarantees. These MPLS TE capabilities bring explicit routing, constraint-based routing, and bandwidth reservation to MPLS networks. MPLS TE relies on extensions to existing IP protocols (TE-RSVP, CR-LDP).