Providing differentiated services using MPLS and traffic engineering

As the Internet evolves into a global information infrastructure, there is a growing need to provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees for applications over the Internet. Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Differentiated Services (Diffserv) are two major technologies currently employed in the networking community for this purpose. This paper proposes an approach to traffic engineering that uses MPLS and Diffserv to enhance QoS performance over an IP network. A novel algorithm for multiple QoS constrained routing with imprecise link state information is presented. Simulation is used to verify the correctness and effectiveness of the algorithm. The service architecture and the functionalities of various techniques of traffic engineering label switched paths (e.g., label switched path setup, provisioning, rerouting) are also discussed.