The modelling of TCP traffic in MPLS networks

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:The Internet has experienced tremendous growth in the last three decades and has emerged as aplatform to carryall forms of communications including voice, video and data. Along with thisgrowth came the urgency for quality of service (QoS) controls in IP networks as different types oftraffics have different service requirements. Although the IP protocol is able to scale to very largenetworks, it does not provide sufficient functionality for traffic engineering in order to enable QoScontrol.Multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) is a new routing technology that enhances IP with someQoS concepts from ATM and uses relatively simple packet forwarding mechanisms. MPLS has theability to perform traffic engineering and QoS control by routing traffic flowson virtual connectionscalled label switched paths (LSPs) which are assigned capacity.A large portion of the traffic carried on the Internet consists of data traffic in the form of TCPtraffic. This thesis investigates several TCP models to find the ones most suitable to representTCP traffic in MPLS networks. The models consist of three types. The first type models a singleTCP source and the second type models a fixed number of TCP sources. The third type modelsan infinite number of TCP sources. The models were evaluated by comparing their throughputpredictions and results obtained from simulation experiments that were done with the widely-usedsimulator ns. We also present a simple derivation of the 1/,;e law for the TCP congestion windowsize where e is the packet loss probability.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University