The BVID Allocation Problem in 802.1Qay Provider Backbone Bridged Traffic Engineered Networks

Carrier Ethernet has rapidly advanced itself to become an important technology for metro transport. PBB-TE or Provider Backbone Bridging-Traffic Engineering is one of the mechanisms being considered for the deployment of Carrier Ethernet. PBB-TE relies on the assignment of a network-specific VLAN tag called the BVID that is further dependent on customer and service provider VLAN tags, service provider MAC address and an intermediate instantiation service tag. Given the limited availability of BVIDs in a network on account of the basic tag format, it is desired to reuse tags to facilitate larger service instance provisioning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first instance of isolating this problem of limited BVID availability, which is further reduced to a constrained optimization problem. We present optimal (static) and heuristic (dynamic) algorithms to the solution of the BVID problem. Results show significant betterment as compared to commercial practices for both the static and dynamic case.