DiffServ-enabled adaptive traffic engineering over MPLS

In the past few years, new types of Internet applications that require performance guarantees beyond the best effort service have emerged. These applications have spread to include voice, video teleconferencing, and a new set of pervasive computing devices that demand hard delay bound guarantees. The Differentiated services model when combined with Traffic engineering can provide a suitable architecture for ensuring QoS guarantees to such kinds of applications, especially when multiple parallel paths to the same destination exist in a provider's network. Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a new technology that facilitates significantly the process of traffic engineering in IP networks. With MPLS and Differentiated Services Traffic Engineering (DS-TE), it is possible to define explicit routes with different performance guarantees on each route to ensure QoS constraints are met. In this work, we introduce a probe packet approach to measure the delay on established Label Switched Paths (LSPs) between ingress/egress edge routers pair. These measurements are then used in a delay estimation algorithm to provide the measure of the expected delay within the path. We demonstrate, through simulations, that our proposed model provides a better service to higher priority traffic classes.