The Efficiency of Traffic Engineering with Regard to Link Failure Resilience

IP networks have established as a global telecommunication platform with increasing user population and an extending spectrum of services. The traffic is also steadily increasing, recently driven by peer to peer networking in addition to client server based applications. Network planers and operators have to ensure the scalability of IP platforms in a permanent upgrade process for transmission capacities. At present, Deutsche Telekom and other telecommunication network providers are introducing traffic engineering methods to achieve an optimum resource utilization. In a first step, traffic engineering can be applied to a predefined network topology, but a comprehensive approach has to be coordinated with a process for upgrading the link capacities and has to prepare for relevant failure scenarios. We have evaluated the efficiency of traffic engineering together with simple link upgrade strategies in order to get a maximum throughput. Therefore a predefined traffic matrix T is taken into account. The optimization goal is to scale the traffic matrix by a maximum factor ? max such that the traffic demand ? max T can still be carried on the available network resources. The influence of the network topology on the evaluation results is shown in examples with regard to single link failures.