Dynamic Provisioning Performance In GMPLS Networks With RSVP-TE Signaling Protocol

Although dynamic provisioning is an exciting feature of GMPLS networks, it is still largely unknown to the industry as well as the academia how GMPLS-enabled optical networks will perform under varied traffic patterns. As different applications and services may have totally different requirements on network dynamicity, it is important to define standard metrics to characterize the performance of such networks, such that the application need and network provisioning capability can be mapped to each other. By far this is still a new area and has not attracted much attention.In this paper, we introduce our pioneering work in GMPLS signaling performance measurement. We propose a set of fundamental performance metrics which include setup delay, release delay and configuration distinct delay to dispict the dynamic provisioning performance that may be of interest to network operators, device vendors and application designers. We design the measurements to test the unidirectional and bidirectional configuration distinct delay and do some tests in GMPLS-enabled optical networks using the self-developed software. We present testing results from state of the art GMPLS-enabled optical networks and provide some insights which include the good linear relationship between the average setup delay and the hops, the variance increases as the number of hops in an LSP increases and as the arrival interval approaches the minimum delay, the setup delay will increase dramatically. The further research directions of performance analysis of GMPLS networks are also discussed finally.