The Influence of MPLS Transport Network Design to the Performance of Off-line Traffic Engineering

There are now primarily two schemes for MPLS transport network design. This paper evaluates the performance of off-line traffic engineering under two schemes. Simulations have been done in ns2 environment. Results show that when network capacity is limited (such as in wireless network or ad- hoc network), the relative error between the performance of off-line traffic engineering and the theoretical optimal performance can be decreased by more than 80% if, we choose smaller packet length under acceptable packet utilization rate. Therefore, from the perspective of traffic engineering, when designing MPLS transport network, the scheme of short ATM cells will have more advantage to balance load of network across all links, and hence provides better perceived QoS of network.