Genetic-based traffic engineering in GMPLS networks

The exponential growth of the Internet and the trend toward providing differentiated classes of service has placed heavy burdens on network management and control operations. Adding more resources may temporarily relieve congestion conditions, but it is not a cost-effective solution in solving resource contention problems in the long run. What service providers need are effective traffic engineering mechanisms to coordinate, control, and efficiently utilize existing resources to satisfy customer demand. MPLS has emerged as a potential enabling technology for those tasks by realizing, with native tunneling techniques, multiple explicit label switched paths throughout the network. In this paper the optimal label switched path displacement problem is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem and solved using a genetic algorithm-based approach. Several solutions can be proposed and the one that best matches the traffic engineering requirements be chosen.