An algorithm for default forwarding trunk splitting (DFTS) to enhance bandwidth uitilization

Abstract

One of the most important capabilities of MPLS is to map traffic on paths established with traffic engineering principles, resulting in load balancing and fault tolerance of the underlying network. Traffic engineering deals with performance optimization and evaluation so that the overall performance for a network can be enhanced. Traffic Engineering with Link Coloring (TELIC) is an algorithm that assigns LSP’s to incoming traffic requests that enter an MPLS-DiffServ domain in a service aware manner. TELIC routes the best effort traffic preferably on separate links, away from the links carrying premium traffic. TELIC is shown to achieve remarkable success in routing EF or premium trunks separately with the DF flows. However, the DF rejection ratio is higher in TELIC as compared with other TE algorithms. This thesis proposes an enhancement for TELIC and SHORTD in order to increase the bandwidth allocation ratio for best effort traffic. Default Forwarding Trunk Splitting (DFTS) is a new algorithm developed and integrated with TELIC and SHORTD. This algorithm splits the rejected DF trunks across the domain into several smaller trunks and routes them on separate preferred links. DFTS has been developed in Visual C++ using object oriented design. TELIC’s performance with and without DFTS algorithm is measured by using it on a specific set of traffic requests that arrive at networks built with two different topologies such as ISP and Disjoint Multipath. The same traffic sets and topologies are used to measure SHORTD’s performance with and without DFTS.