CSE-MTECH-00-402




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.