Multilayer traffic engineering in IP-over-Optical Networks

Recent advances in optical networking technology have moved the state-of-the-art from manually installed fiber connections to fully automatic switched lightpaths. IP-over-Optical networks carry Internet traffic between IP routers, using lightpaths (optical connections) with multi Gbit/s bandwidth as transport method. Multilayer Traffic Engineering (MTE) in an IP-over-Optical network allows to leverage rapid lightpath setup/teardown as a cross-layer traffic engineering technique. It enables on-the-fly reconfiguration of the IP layer logical topology (creating connectivity between IP routers) and up/downgrade of the capacity of IP links (by adding or removing lightpaths between IP routers). Together with classical IP layer routing techniques, MTE intelligently solves problems such as IP layer congestion and packet loss and it may optimize optical layer capacity usage and total network throughput. We present some example MTE techniques and discuss how they impact perceived network performance.