A Practical Traffic Control Scheme With Load Balancing Based on PCE Architecture

The path computation element (PCE) is used for the path computation for traffic engineering systems such as multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) and Generalized MPLS networks. It offers a good architecture for the centralized traffic routing and control. The classic routing policy aims to select one “best” path for the traffic, which may cause network congestion in the best link. How to adjust traffic to alleviate or avoid congestion is an important issue for operating networks. In this paper, according to the topology and the traffic model of China Telecom's network, we propose a practical traffic control scheme with load balancing based on the PCE architecture. The objective of the traffic control scheme is twofold. First, an adaptive end-to-end path selection algorithm is proposed to select high-quality main and backup paths with the consideration of cost and path utilization. Second, a global routing optimization algorithm is proposed to adjust the path for the traffic, which considers the congestion feedback, the adjustment cost, and the expectation of load balance. The results show that our proposed scheme is able to efficiently alleviate or avoid congestion problem and achieve good performance in terms of the balance of link utilization and minimum computation time.