Parameter impact on the performance of partial label switching (PLS)

With the rapid growth of Internet, the size of routing table of backbone router grows rapidly. As a result, the label space of MPLS is becoming a critical resource. In this paper, we introduce partial label switching (PLS) technology, which utilizes label space efficiently by distributing labels only to those frequently used route entries, and then investigate the impact of PLS parameters on the performance of PLS. The analysis and simulation results show that to achieve good performance, the scan window of the PLS scheme should be set between 30s and 60s. Upper threshold h_u and lower threshold h_d can be set based on offline analysis of past traffic of a router. h_d should be set at about 30% of h_u in order to avoid the oscillation of flow state.