RD-QoS - the integrated provisioning of resilience and QoS in MPLS-based networks

The provisioning of QoS and resilience is becoming a key issue in today's IP-based networks. The current discussion centers around multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) as the common platform to support both, QoS and resilience in IP backbones. Any well-designed recovery strategy has to take into account the different resilience requirements of the single traffic flows in order to avoid excessive usage of bandwidth for standby links. After reviewing MPLS components and recovery options, this paper presents a signaling method which allows the resilience requirements of individual services to be signaled to the network in addition to their QoS requirements. The resulting possibility to tailor the end-to-end network resilience is then used to integrate the capacity provisioning for the single resilience classes with the MPLS traffic-engineering process. A case study shows the large network capacity savings achievable via this approach.