A path tuning algorithm for short-term traffic engineering of QoS differentiated MPLS networks

The recent growth in Internet traffic and services has made the provisioning of end-to-end quality of service (QoS) in large-scale networks a necessity. Traffic engineering (TE) emerges as an important constituent of QoS provisioning. This paper presents a distributed path tuning algorithm (PTA) for short-term traffic engineering in a delay differentiated MPLS network. In this network, each node carries a number of MPLS paths passing through a set of delay classes. These paths are established and assigned to certain delay classes at each node using a centralized long-term traffic engineering mechanism. The main objective of the proposed PTA is to fine-tune the long-term initial configuration and respond to short-term variations in order to minimize reserved resources. The PTA is constrained to maintain the end-to-end QoS requirements for all provisioned unicast paths.