QoS path selection exploiting minimum link delays in MPLS-based networks

Real-time multimedia is typically associated with various Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Several QoS routing schemes have been proposed to determine a path which has sufficient bandwidth to achieve the desired QoS requirements. Some of these schemes flood nodes with advertisements to obtain information about congestion on the links. Consequently, protocol overhead is of concern in such cases. Other schemes use source routing to determine the shortest routing path, but security is a major concern for allowing source routing in the Internet [23]. To efficiently support QoS over IP networks, Traffic Engineering (TE) has introduced Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). QoS routing is an essential component of MPLS to maximize network resources. In this paper, we propose an approach that sets up a Label Switched Path (LSP) based on the lowest time delay from the ingress to the egress router using only the ingress, rather than requiring all the nodes in the network to exchange information. Our simulation results show that with our proposed approach, we obtain an improvement in the number of packets delivered and better use of network resources. Furthermore, modification of the MPLS domain is not required.