Balanced Traffic Distribution for MPLS Using Bin Packing Method

Traffic engineering (TE) is concerned with performance optimization of operational networks. The overlay approach allows service providers to build arbitrary virtual topology over the network\´s physical topology. Instead of overlaying IP routing over the logical virtual network, the Integrated approach runs shortest path IP routing natively over the physical topology. The new bin packing approach is proposed here for load balancing in MPLS. The objective is to determine minimum number of bins needed to accommodate all \´n\´ objects. Likewise all the traffic flow (considered as objects) should be distributed along the number of paths (considered as bins) evenly. The bin-packing based partitioning algorithm (BPA) attempts to improve the load balance during the partitioning of the load, Unallocated traffic is first distributed using a "best-fit" approach. If this fails, the "most-free" approach is adopted until all the traffic is allocated. We investigate the quality of the routing in the Integrated approach with respect to link load, traffic distribution and link utilization. This method strikes a good balance between the conflicting objectives of link load and optimizing the QoS routing.