Services-based architecture for performance monitoring of MPLS networks

Today's network management applications have to be able to keep up with the increasing speed, additional services and new quality of service features of modern communication technologies. In particular, network monitoring is crucial to identify possible deficiencies, violation of service level agreements, and finally to guarantee an efficient operation. One example in this area, promising to improve provider networks in terms of resource utilization and overall capacity, is multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), which replaces slower IP routing with fast switching. MPLS is based on fixed-length identifiers, so-called labels, which are used by label switching routers (LSRs) to forward incoming packets along label switched paths (LSPs). At the edge of an MPLS domain, all labels are removed and conventional routing is used. In this context, the paper presents a distributed, Web-based architecture for the management of MPLS networks focusing on performance monitoring, e.g. of bandwidth, throughput, and error rate of LSPs. The architecture uses so-called management services realized with SOAP (simple object access protocol) and XML.