Building an MPLS-TP simulator

Service providers are experiencing a challenge that is caused by the explosive growth in demand for high-speed connections to and across metropolitan, regional and core networks. Operators are under pressure to increase the capacity of their networks to meet these ever growing requirements. To improve service agility and network efficiency and reduce costs throughout their entire infrastructures, providers are evaluating ways to use packet transport everywhere. Carrier Ethernet is a new mechanism that is being proposed to consolidate the packet optical transport network. Multiprotocol Label Switching-Transport Profile (MPLS-TP) - a variant of Carrier Ethernet offers a potentially important addition within the packet transport toolset. Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM) functionality is central to this new standard. This helps service creation and assurance thus providing an extension to packet transport capabilities within emerging multi-layer infrastructure architectures. This paper aims at exploring the performance of MPLS-TP network using an extensive simulation model.