Metro Ethernet traffic engineering based on optimal multiple spanning trees

The flexibility, scalability, simplicity and low cost of Ethernet technology makes it an ideal networking technology for Metro networks. However, the new Ethernet-based solutions must be able to support the growing network needs of the enterprise including the various QoS requirements. Our focus in this paper is traffic engineering which is one of the integral components of QoS provisioning. We propose a scheme based on the generation and management of multiple spanning trees for near optimal traffic distribution.