A PCE-based Connectivity Provisioning Management Framework

Abstract

Many carriers and service providers (SPs) use MPLS to achieve traffic engineering (TE) objectives, such as network resources optimization, support for end-to-end QoS guarantees services, aggregated traffic measurement and fast recovery against link/node/shared risk link group (SRLG) failures. The three main traffic engineering components of MPLS are the routing component, responsible for the discovery of the network topology, the path computation component, responsible for the assignment of resources to traffic demands, and the signaling component, responsible for the establishment of the label switched paths (LSPs) along the computed path. Path computation under QoS and administrative constraints is usually performed sub-optimally in network nodes, which are mainly dedicated to traffic forwarding. Off-load of this task to specialized network entities is a key aspect of the path computation element (PCE) architecture. This paper describes an ongoing implementation of such architecture seeking for cooperation of control and management plane components for overall network operation and management optimization. Early functional testing of the software components, performed in cooperation with a service provider, is presented.