Multiprotocol Label Switching Design and Implementation Issues
Nikunj Vaidya,
M.Tech,
00,
60 pp.
Department of
Computer Science and Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay,
Powai, Mumbai 400 076.
Supervisor(s):
G. Sivakumar
With the increasing demand of varied and new services over the Internet,
the performance of the intermediate router nodes presents a significant
impact on the network's overall forwarding capabilities.
MPLS ({\it Multiprotocol Label Switching}) is a new forwarding paradigm that
attempts to address these issues.
A forwarding paradigm based on {\it label swapping} has a number of advantages
compared to the traditional Internet Protocol forwarding method.
An important feature of the paradigm is its support for evolution of newer
and more involved routing mechanisms without affecting the performance of
the forwarding procedures.
Label switching is suitable for network cores.
It supports {\it explicit paths} and hence, allows for easier implementation
of {\it policy based routing} and {\it traffic engineering}.
Label switched path setup is broadly classified as {\it control-traffic}
driven and {\it data-traffic} driven.
Aggregate flow driven path setups dynamically optimize the number of paths
to those actually used by the network.
Control-traffic driven approaches setup paths based on routing updates and
hence, introduce lesser control messages.
MPLS is a work in progress and incorporates various control mechanism schemes.
Our design here incorporates a mixed approach with the aim of achieving
efficient resource utilization.
Part of the design is simulated on {\it Network Simulator}, a freely
available software.
This simulation helps in experimenting with the protocol mechanisms.