DESIGN OF IP NETWORKS WITH END-TO-END PERFORMANCE GUARANTEES

In this paper, we examine the issues that surround IP network design with quality of service (QoS) guarantees and propose a new network design methodology. The proposed network design model takes ac-count of the new QoS technologies (i.e., DiffServ/MPLS) and allows for multiple delay constraints so that guaranteed performance can be achieved for each of the traffic classes. After discussing the most cru-cial planning issues that must be addressed when QoS mechanisms are used in an IP-based network, a non-linear multicommodity optimisa-tion problem is formulated and heuristics for its approximate solutions are described. The network design model is evaluated in terms of accu-racy and scalability for each of the main components that the model employs. The computational results for each of the building blocks demonstrate that realistic size problems can be solved with the pro-posed method