A case study of multiservice, multipriority traffic engineering design for data networks

We present techniques, some of which are novel, for traffic engineering in QoS-supported data networks, and also illustrate the application of these techniques in a case study. In the interest of scalability all these techniques use multicommodity flow (MCF) solution techniques as primitives. The techniques address the design of topology and size of explicit routes in MPLS-supported IP networks and VPNs. The techniques are for network-wide optimization subject to constraints on routing imposed by end-to-end QoS and other considerations. The notion of admissible route sets specific to service class and source-destination pair is used to differentiate QoS constraints on real-time services, such as Internet telephony and video, and relatively delay insensitive services, such as premium data. Contrasting optimization techniques are given for services, such as best effort, for which no restriction on routes are imposed. Another important traffic engineering requirement addressed is priorities, for which an efficient and accurate design technique is given.