Traffic Engineering in Fourth Generation Wireless Networks

We present an extension to the multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) traffic engineering in fourth generation (4G) composite networks. In a 4G composite network users should be able to select among various radio access technologies that can individually or collectively satisfy the users' capacity and quality of service requirements. The extension provides the ability to diverge traffic flows away from a path that cannot satisfy the QoS requirements of a flow. When the QoS requirements of a traffic flow exceed a predefined threshold, the extension will distribute the flow among multiple paths based on the cost of the traffic distribution and the effectiveness of label switching routers (LSPs). The simulation results demonstrate that the extension significantly improves the overall network performance.