A practical multi-plane routing-based traffic engineering scheme in evolutionary convergent all-IP access networks

With the expected surge in the global IP traffic, service providers would need to adapt accordingly to operate disruption and loss free networks supported with the developing IP infrastructure. With the disposal of the hierarchical network structure, radio access networks are moving towards a flat-IP architecture and novel topological set-ups in the backhaul. Hence, a routing paradigm that employs suitable Traffic Engineering (TE) techniques aligned with the developing nature of future access networks must be applied. In this paper, Multi-Plane Routing (MPR) that consolidates various aspects in all-IP infrastructure is remodelled in consistent with this development. We propose a MPR-based TE approach considering two different scenarios to reflect the evolution in the architectural design of access network structures under a realistic traffic scenario with a varying range of internal/external traffic. Accordingly, a practical performance evaluation testing the validity of the aforementioned scenarios is presented. Our simulation results demonstrate a better achieved performance under the flat-IP structure in addition to MPR-based methods' superiority over legacy OSPF/Invcap. Performance degradation is observed with the rise in the internal traffic distribution for the different scenarios studied. Moreover, a new optimization framework for the offline and online TE mechanisms of MPR have been proposed.