Constraint-based routing in traffic engineering

Traffic engineering (TE) describes a domain-wide perspective for traffic control as opposed to application-specific concerns of QoS. MPLS is today's most powerful architecture for TE. Constraint-based routing refers to the process of path assignment to flows to fulfill the TE objective which has been defined in a number of multi-constraint ways, and is the most significant component of TE. In this paper, we review constraint-based routing algorithms. We first provide an overview of MPLS/TE and place constraint-based routing within this approach. We then look into the potential path attributes and the underlying platform to characterize these algorithms before we present our review. Our study provides a comprehensive reference to the operational structure and specifications of constraint-based routing algorithms.