QoS Design Issues and Traffic Engineering in Next Generation IP/MPLS Network

Providing quality of service (QoS) and traffic engineering capabilities in the next generation multi-service networks is essential, especially to support the requirements of real-time applications. multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) is rapidly emerging technology, which plays a key role in next generation networks by delivering QoS and traffic engineering features. MPLS dramatically improves the performance and scalability of backbone networks, enabling service providers to have the capability to extend service differentiation using MPLS differentiated services (DiffServ) techniques. This paper discusses the MPLS DiffServ integration to achieve QoS on MPLS networks and the MPLS traffic engineering to improve backbone efficiency independently of QoS. The following simulation study is an effort to evaluate how well MPLS traffic engineering and QoS can improve the performance of today´s networks, and identify opportunities for improvement, and development of new mechanisms to ensure the provision of traffic engineering, as well as QoS features in future networks.