Design and Analysis of Flow Aware Load Balancing Mechanisms for Multi-Service Networks

Ethernet technology is being deployed in metro and wide area networks. However, despite recent evolutions, Ethernet cannot be considered a carrier class technology due mainly to the lack of facilities for efficient Traffic Engineering (TE). In this paper, the authors propose a Flow-aware TE approach for carrier class Ethernet networks providing services like those defined by the Metro Ethernet Forum. The flow-aware networking approach they consider is based on the Cross-protect router mechanisms, allowing satisfactory quality for streaming and elastic flows without explicitly identifying traffic classes by the combined use of fair queuing and admission control.