The New Technical Approach

This chapter introduces a technical approach for delivering QoS in the business model, and describes how it addresses the integration, and the complexity challenges. This technical approach consists of the several steps that include network planning, network auditing, traffic control, traffic optimization, and performance measurement. Network planning is to plan and provision one's network so that it meets current and future demand in a cost-effective way. Network planning sets the network structure, capacity, routing policies, and security framework. Traffic control deals with optimizing traffic distribution inside the framework, either in normal network condition, or in failure scenarios. Common traffic control schemes include traffic engineering, traffic protection, and restoration, and traffic management. Interdomain traffic engineering can introduce significant traffic distribution change in a network. Traffic engineering with MPLS tunnels is a well-known traffic engineering approach. MPLS traffic engineering allows network operators to assign a bandwidth value to each link. The assigned bandwidth usually equals to the physical bandwidth of the link. MPLS traffic engineering also allows the assignment of a bandwidth value to each MPLS tunnel. This value usually equals to the amount of traffic carried by the tunnel, as measured.