MPLS Network Tuning: Enabling Hitless Network Engineering

MPLS traffic engineering has primarily focussed on efficient route setups. However, as data traffic explodes, lacking the hierarchical growth structure of voice traffic, there is an increased demand for tools that enable network-wide tuning in order to sustain required levels of end-to-end network efficiency. Network tuning aims to proactively reconfigure traffic and topology without causing any service disruption. In this paper, we explore the requirements on management systems to support tuning. While network design tools have similar goals, the additional requirement for online, hitless optimization fundamentally changes the nature of the problem. We present an efficient algorithm for network tuning called MöbiTree. Using extensive simulation results, we show that the greedy approach in MöbiTree outperforms traditional traffic design schemes. More importantly, it achieves the gains while ensuring a hitless reconfiguration. Moreover, it has low computational overhead, making it cheap to implement in practice.