The Impact of IP Network Structures on the Efficiency of Traffic Engineering Including Failure Resilience

Gerhard Haßlinger, Stefan Schnitter and Martin Franzke

T-Systems, Technologiezentrum D-64307 Darmstadt, Germany

Abstract:

IP networks have established as the global telecommunication platform with increasing user population and a extending spectrum of services over the last decade. The traffic is also increasing driven by peer to peer networking in addition to client server based applications, forcing network planers and operators to steadily upgrade the transmission capacities. Deutsche Telekom and other telecommunication network providers are presently introducing traffic engineering methods to achieve an optimum throughput according to the source to destination traffic demands. In a first step, traffic engineering can be applied to a predefined network topology, but a comprehensive approach has to take into account the process of steadily upgrading the link capacities to cope with increasing traffic loads and has to prepare for relevant failure scenarios. We have evaluated the efficiency of traffic engineering together with simple link upgrade strategies in order to get a maximum throughput in terms of a linear increase of a considered traffic matrix. The influence of the network topology on the evaluation results is shown in examples with regard to single link failures.