Author : Manoj Kumar and Shishir Sangal

Traffic Engineering is defined as way of routing data through network in lieu of management view, availability of resources and the current and expected traffic. It also helps the network provider to make the best use of available resources. Different uses of internet requires different levels of services to be supplied, for instance voice traffic requires low delay and very small delay variation. Video traffic adds the requirement for high bandwidth, etc. Hop-by-hop approach is used to forward a packet in a network using IP protocol. Routing protocols are used to create routing tables, to find a path which has the minimum cost, according to its metrics to each destination in the network. This technique results in the over-utilization of some links while other links remain unused and are under-utilized, which leads to the congestion in the Network (I. Zafar et al, 2011; F. Ahmed et al, 2011). MPLS does not route data on the basis of destination address rather it routes data according to the labels. Using MPLS network, resources can be optimized by sending data through less congested path rather than the shortest path used in routing protocols. These new paths are created manually or through some signaling protocols. MPLS supports many features like traffic engineering, QoS and VPNs etc. (Hussein A. Mohammed et al, 2013; Adnan Hussein et al, 2013)Through MPLS in traffic engineering we can improve the usage of network resources making it more efficient. In this paper a comparison analysis is done based on traffic engineering parameters like effective utilization of bandwidth, delay, throughput, etc. for different type of traffic in their movements across the network for both MPLS-TE and traditional IP network. OPNET Modeler is used to simulate the results of comparisons.

Keywords: Multiprotocol layer switching OPNET modeler, Traffic Engineering, Virtual Private Network.

Article published in International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology, Vol.5, No.1 (Feb-2015)