Lightweight monitoring of label switched paths for bandwidth management

The purpose of resource management is the efficient and effective use of network resources, for instance bandwidth. In this article, a connection oriented network scenario is considered, where a certain amount of bandwidth is reserved for each label switch path (LSP), which is a logical path, in a MPLS or GMPLS environment. Assuming there is also some kind of admission control (explicit or implicit), these environments typically provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees. It could happen that some LSPs become busy, thus rejecting connections, while other LSPs may be under-utilised. We propose a distributed lightweight monitoring technique, based on threshold values, the objective of which is to detect congestion when it occurs in an LSP and activate the corresponding alarm which will trigger a dynamic bandwidth reallocation mechanism.

1. Introduction

Nowadays, telecommunication networks are. evolving quickly and continuously. Transmission speeds and the number of users and services have been growing more and more in recent years. However, there is a noticeable lack of dynamic management tools for resource configuration. Current network management systems are not able to monitor and manage such networks in a centralized way. Centralized management results in a scalability problem because the network management centre is responsible for collecting and processing all the monitoring data from all the network elements being managed.