Load balancing by MPLS in differentiated services networks

Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) assigns a short label to each packet and packets are forwarded according to these labels. The capability of MPLS of explicit routing as well as of splitting of the traffic on several paths allows load balancing. The paper first concentrates on two previously known approximations of the minimum-delay routing. Using these load balancing algorithms from the literature as a starting point, the main goal of this paper is to develop optimization algorithms that differentiate classes in terms of mean delay using of both routing and WFQ-scheduling. Both optimal and approximative algorithms are developed for the joint optimization of the WFQ-weights and routing. As a result it is found that the use of the approximations simplifies the optimization problem but still provides results that are near to optimal.