APPLICATION-AWARE TRAFFIC ENGINEERING WITH SEGMENT ROUTING

Techniques are presented herein that enhance segment routing (SR) traffic engineering (TE) through, among other things, the incorporation of a network protocol facility. Such a facility collects active Internet Protocol (IP) network traffic, as it flows in to or out of an interface, and then analyzes the collected data to develop an understanding of network traffic particulars such as, for example, flow, volume, etc. Aspects of the presented techniques leverage a Path Computation Element (PCE) for path calculations and support the ability to create multiple unique service-level agreement (SLA) tunnels, based on application flows or Layer 7 information within a network, for the same set of source and destination addresses. Further aspects of the presented techniques employ a category database (which may comprise a worldwide list of applications and a service category which describes the type of each application) that is updated by a network protocol facility and a tunnel requirements database (that associates an SLA class to specific tunnel requirements) to yield an on-demand tunnel classification capability that allows a PCE entity to leverage the above-described databases to match a required SLA class to an SR TE tunnel within a network. An arrangement as described above, according to the techniques presented herein, offers a new, redefined, way of scaling and providing better SLAs to specific services at an application level