MPLS-Enabled Applications: Emerging Developments and New Technologies

2.2. THE BUSINESS DRIVERS

Influencing the path that traffic takes in the network can increase revenues in two ways:

1. Offering new services with extra guarantees.

2. Lowering the investment in new network resources (primarily band-width) by improving the utilization of existing resources.

'Offering new services' means any guarantee that the operator can charge extra money for. One example is the 'guaranteed bandwidth service', which simply means that a certain amount of bandwidth is available for a particular customer's traffic, both in the steady state and under failure conditions.

'Improving resource utilization' means avoiding a situation where part of the network is congested while other parts are underutilized. For example, if some part of the traffic is routed around a congested link on to a path where enough bandwidth is available, the upgrade of the congested link can be delayed. Avoiding congestion also means better quality for the customer traffic: less loss, less delay and better throughput.

Another important cost-saving measure achieved through traffic engineering is increasing the maximum percentage of link utilization. Operators constantly monitor link utilization to determine at which point it is necessary to schedule a link upgrade. Each network has its own upgrade rules, expressed in terms of the percentage of link utilization that triggers an upgrade. A typical rule is to upgrade at 50% utilization, to be able to accommodate traffic shifting from a failed link. The ...