Investigation of Bandwidth Reservation for Segment Routing

Abstract

Traffic Engineering (TE) is a critical topic in network routing and switching. The topic has been intensively investigated. New network architecture has also been proposed to improve TE, e.g., Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) architecture. MPLS has been widely used to in the past 15 years or so. However, the overhead associated with MPLS architecture is high, particularly the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP)-TE protocol used for signaling and path creation/maintenance. Segment Routing (SR) is a relatively new network solution to mitigate the high overhead issue of MPLS/RSVP- TE and it has gained increasing attention. SR for IPv6 (SRv6) has drawn a great deal of attention recently for efficient and flexible TE features. However, more research is still needed for SRv6-based bandwidth reservation for TE, as RSVP- TE used for bandwidth reservation is no longer part of SR. The objective of this paper is to develop bandwidth reservation algorithms for SR-based solutions and investigate the performance of those algorithms. The current focus is on depth-first search (DFS) and breath first search (BFS) bandwidth reservation algorithms. The preliminary outcomes show that BFS results in higher bandwidth usage, whereas DFS is more time efficient in path computations.