Performance evaluation of detour path selection scheme for MPLS traffic engineering

Multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) allows several detour paths (label switched paths, LSPs) to be (pre-) established for some source-destination pair as well as its primary path of minimum hops. Thus, we should specify how to allocate an arrival flow to these two kinds of paths for effective traffic engineering (TE). So far, we have proposed and analytically evaluated the two-phase path management scheme with the random detour path selection in order to allocate an arrival flow to one of these paths for MPLS-TE. In this paper, we propose two more detour path selection schemes, namely, fixed detour path selection and least-loaded detour path selection, and compare the performance of the detour path selection schemes. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of the load imbalance on TE performance of our proposed scheme with the least-loaded detour path selection.