Traffic Engineering Based on Local States in Internet Protocol-Based Radio Access Networks

The purpose of this research is to develop and evaluate a traffic engineering architecture that uses local state information. This architecture is applied to an Internet protocol radio access network (RAN) that uses multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) and differentiated services to support mobile hosts. We assume mobility support is provided by a protocol such as the hierarchical mobile Internet protocol. The traffic engineering architecture is router based-meaning that routers on the edges of the network make the decisions onto which paths to place admitted traffic. We propose an algorithm that supports the architecture and uses local network state in order to function. The goal of the architecture is to provide an inexpensive and fast method to reduce network congestion while increasing the quality of service (QoS) level when compared to traditional routing and traffic engineering techniques. We use a number of different mobility scenarios and a mix of different types of traffic to evaluate our architecture and algorithm. We use the network simulator ns-2 as the core of our simulation environment. Around this core we built a system of pre-simulation, during simulation, and post-processing software that enabled us to simulate our traffic engineering architecture with only very minimal changes to the core ns-2 software. Our simulation environment supports a number of different mobility scenarios and a mix of different types of traffic to evaluate our architecture and algorithm.