Next Generation Network Routing and Control Plane

Concerning the high performance, QoS supported transport services, it is not sufficient that only the traffic transport under a single domain or Autonomous System (AS) is under the consideration. Inter-domain QoS routing is also in a great need. As there has been empirically and theoretically proved, the dominating Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) cannot address all the issues that in inter-domain QoS routing. Thus a new protocol or network architecture has to be developed to be able to carry the inter-domain traffic with the QoS and TE consideration. Moreover, the current network control also lacks the ability to cooperate between different domains and operators. The emergence of label switching transport technology such as of Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) or Generalized MPLS (GMPLS) supports the traffic transport in a finer granularity and more dedicated end-to-end Quality of Service classes. Under the NGN context, there are plenty of proposals intending to accommodate the issues listed above. Path Computation Elements (PCE) proposed by IETF designs suitable network architecture that aiming at compute the QoS based paths for traffic transportation through intra- and inter-domain. It is a routing component that flexibly supports path computation with different requirements, constraints and areas. It is also can be seen as part of NGN transport control plane, which integrates with the other functions. In the aspect of resource control, an NGN release Resource and Admission Control Functions (RACF) provides the platform that enables cooperation and ubiquitous integration between networks. In this paper, we investigate in the network architecture, protocols and algorithms for inter-domain QoS routing and traffic engineering. The PCE based inter-domain routing architecture is enhanced with Domain Path Vector based protocol that compute the domain level path dynamically for the further inter-domain path routing mechanism Backward Recursive Path Computation (BRPC). Furthermore, several algorithms are proposed to compute the domain-level path under more than one constrains (multi-constrains). It is shown by the simulation and analysis that the proposed DPV enhanced PCE inter-domain routing architecture improves the performance of BRPC mechanism in terms of reducing the blocking probabilities and increasing the network inter-domain link utilization. The proposed algorithms enable the PCE compute the domain level path with optimized multiple constrains.