Simulator for MPLS path restoration and performance evaluation

Path restoration in multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) is the technique to reroute traffic around a failure in a label switched path (LSP). Recently many schemes on path restoration have been proposed, which prompt the necessity of a simulator. This paper proposes a simulator for path restoration, which supports not only protection configurations such as pre-negotiated protection and dynamic protection, but also protection activation such as global repair and local repair. By using the proposed simulator, the existing schemes are simulated and compared in terms of packet loss, reordering of packets, and resource utilization, respectively. Those schemes are Haskin, Makam, and simple-dynamic. In the simulation, both best-effort traffic and QoS traffic are used as traffic to be protected. LSPs for best-effort traffic are setup by using explicit routed (ER) LSP, which does not consider resource reservation but can utilize the rest of the bandwidth of the link. LSPs for QoS traffic are setup by using constraint-based routed (CR) LSP, which is guaranteed the bandwidth required but can not utilize the rest of the bandwidth of the link.