Analysis of Practical Aspects of Multi-Plane Routing-Based Load Balancing Approach for Future Link-State Convergent All-IP Access Networks

Abstract

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. It becomes imminent that the routing considerations for IP access networks converge with the ones found in conventional intra-domain routing. In this paper, Multi-Plane Routing (MPR) that consolidates various aspects in all-IP infrastructure is extensively studied in access network structures. 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. Moreover, a new optimization framework for the offline and online TE mechanisms of MPR have been formulated. Accordingly, a practical performance evaluation testing the validity of the aforementioned scenarios is presented. Our simulation results demonstrate extensive analysis in terms of several performance criteria in networks. It is convincingly shown that for ranges of topologies, MPR's utilization of whole topology in building path diversity in networks, allows for significant improvement of networks capacity, performance, and support for meshing.