Achieving balanced traffic distribution in MPLS networks

Traffic Engineering (TE) broadly relates to optimization of the performance of a network. The Overlay approach has been widely used by many service providers for Traffic Engineering in large Internet backbones. In this approach logical connections are set up between edge nodes to form a full mesh virtual network on top of the physical topology. Instead of overlaying IP routing over the logical virtual network, the Integrated approach runs shortest path IP routing natively over the physical topology. We investigate the quality of the routing in the Integrated approach with respect to link load, traffic distribution and link utilization. We propose a knapsack method to improve the quality of the routing. This method strikes a good balance between the conflicting objectives of link load and optimizing the QoS routing. Moreover we apply the knapsack method to the problem of minimizing the maximum link utilization given a traffic matrix. With the knapsack method, we can achieve almost the same maximum link utilization and improve the quality of routing.