Scalability and routing performance of label switching networks

Scalability is one of the major concerns associated with current label switching proposals. The aim of label switching is to provide an economical solution to the provision of high speed Internet IP networks. Previous research effort has concentrated on the issue of VC usage and its minimization. While VC usage is an important aspect of scalability the issues of routing and delay performance are equally significant. This paper considers in detail the routing and delay performance of various schemes. It is shown that the performance of control driven approaches such as tag switching depends upon the level of IP route aggregation in the network. Results also indicate that at high levels of aggregation, destination based approaches suffer delay and delay variance penalties over source/destination approaches such as IP switching.