ADAPTIVE CAPACITY ALLOCATION IN MPLS NETWORKS

Traffic Congestion is one of the salient issues that affect overall network performance. Network traffic has become very dynamic due to a variety of factors, such as, the number of users varies with time of the day, multimedia applications, bursts in traffic due to a failure and so on. Recently, Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks have emerged as a technology with many promising features such as traffic engineering, QoS provisioning, and speeding up the traffic transmission. However, MPLS still suffers from the nonstationary/transient conditions that sometimes cause congestion. Actually, congestion does not always occur when the network is short capacity, but rather, when the network resources are not efficiently utilized. Thus, it is very important to develop an algorithm that efficiently and dynamically adjusts the available capacity. In this thesis, we propose an adaptive capacity allocation scheme. We have started our consideration with a single traffic class system that has dynamic traffic where traffic arrival is considered at the level of connection/call arrival. We assume that the virtual network for this traffic class operates as a loss system; i.e. if a connection does not find bandwidth, the connection is blocked and cleared from the system. Then, we extended our work to include the multiple traffic classes. Two cases have been studied and analyzed; when classes have no coupling and when they are coupled. The capacity allocation scheme is derived from a first-order, differential equation-based, fluid-flow model that captures the traffic dynamics. The scheme aims to maintain the connection blocking probability within a specified range by dynamically adjusting the allocated capacity. A fluid flow differential equation model is developed to model the changing traffic environment. Using the fluid flow model, Lyapunov Stability theory is used to derive a novel adaptive capacity adjustment scheme which guarantees overall system stability while maintaining the target QoS parameters. Numerical results are given which show that the Lyapunov control based scheme successfully provides the desired QoS requirements and performs better than existing schemes in the literature