RATES: A Server for MPLS Traffic Engineering

It has been suggested that one of the most significant reasons for Multi-Protocol Label Switched Network (MPLS) deployment is network traffic engineering. The goal of traffic engineering is to make best use of the network infrastructure and this is facilitated by the explicit routing feature of MPLS which allows the potential addressing of many shortcomings associated with current IGP routing schemes. This paper describes a software system called Routing and Traffic engineering. It also describes some new routing ideas incorporated in RATES for MPLS explicit path selection. The RATES implementation consists of a policy and flow database, a browser based interface for policy definition and entering resource provisioning requests, and a COPS server-client implementation for communicating paths and resource information to edge routers. RATES also uses the OSPF topology database for dynamically obtaining link-state information.