Controlled Bandwidth Borrowing with Extended RSVP-TE to Maximize Bandwidth Utilization

Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) has been developed as a key technology to enhance the reliability, manageability and overall quality of service of core If networks with connection-oriented tunnel LSP and traffic engineering such as constraint-based routing, explicit routing, and restoration. In this paper, we propose a control bandwidth borrowing scheme that maximizes the utilization of tunnel LSPs or physical links by an extension to the RSVP-TE label distribution protocol. MPLS-based core switching network and VPN services rely on the establishment of connection-oriented tunneled LSPs that are configured or predefined by network management systems. The mechanism of network management system varies from (i) a relatively static LSP establishment accounting, to (ii) a dynamic QoS routing mechanisms. With the use of hierarchical LSPs, the extra bandwidth that is unused by the trunk (outer) LSPs should be fully allocated to their constituent end-to-end user traffic (inner) LSPs in order to maximize their utilization. In order to find out the unused extra bandwidth in tunnel LSP or physical link and redistribute these resources to constituent LSPs, we expend the functionality of RSVP-TE and the found unused extra bandwidth is redistributed with a weight-based recursive redistribution scheme. By the extended RSVP-TE and proposed recursive redistributed scheme, we could achieve the instantaneous maximized utilization of tunnel LSP or physical link suffering from the potential under-utilization problem and guarantee the end-to-end QoS requirements. With the proposed scheme, network manager can manage more effectively the extra available bandwidth of hierarchical LSPs and maximize the instantaneous utilization of the tunneled LSP resources.