Loop-free traffic engineering with path protection in MPLS VPNs

In this paper we present a new approach for VPN (virtual private network) traffic engineering with path protection in Multiprotocol Label Switching networks carrying QoS and best effort traffic. Our approach eliminates the path cycles, a problem often encountered in link-based traffic engineering methods. It also allows for control of the maximum path length and the size of the label space in each label switch router. We consider off-line computation of the working and backup paths using a link-based approach. Two cases of 1 + 1 and 1:1 path protection are considered. Numerical results are presented to show the efficacy of the algorithm in calculating link-disjoint and node-disjoint primary and backup paths for the QoS traffic. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved