Quality of service provisioning through traffic engineering with applicability to IP-based production networks

Production networks require the transport of high-quality multimedia traffic between outside broadcast vans and the main studio. This is typically done through dedicated terrestrial or satellite links, with bandwidth purchased from third party network providers, which is expensive and lacks flexibility. Given the emergence of IP networks and the Internet as the multi-service network of choice, it is plausible to consider their use for transporting production network traffic with high bandwidth and low delay and packet loss requirements. Emerging technologies for quality of service such as Differentiated Services and MPLS can be used for premium quality traffic. In this paper we try to use the emerging IP technologies to support services like production network traffic. We present a Traffic Engineering and Control System that starts from agreed services with customers and provisions the network according to the expected traffic demand so as to meet the requirements of contracted services while optimising the use of network resources. We devise a non-linear programming formulation of the problem and show through extensive simulations that we can achieve the objectives and meet the requirements of demanding production network traffic. Our solution is generic enough and not only tuned to production networks, so it can be used in other contexts for supporting services with stringent quality of service requirements.