MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) assisted routing procedure in Software Defined Networking (SDN)

Abstract

Multi-protocol label switching has been incorporated into provider networks to provide quality of service. Owing to the design of the protocol, its ability to push and pop labels in packets, independent of their underlying protocol makes it popular in interconnecting multiple networks in to one transport pipeline. At the same time, multi-protocol label switching has proven to be a very fast procedure for forwarding devices because the central processing unit cycles required in making a forwarding decision is far less compared to traditional forwarding decision-making metrics like analyzing the internet protocol header. However, current multi-protocol label switching implementation is a complex configuration procedure and does not provide a central bird’s eye view of the network topology to network engineers. Logging in to every label switching router and loading multi-protocol label switching configurations to allow it to connect to neighboring label switching routers in the label switching path is required. Allowing network engineers to have a central view and control of the network topology while still providing multi-protocol label switching services in a simplistic approach will make them achieve adaptive routing and traffic engineering seamlessly. This will improve quality of service and quality of experience in transport networks. Software defined networking is the approach this research takes towards providing central control because of the flexibility, programmability, and adaptability of the technology. This work proposed the design of a routing procedure that will implement multi-protocol label switching on a software defined network via OpenFlow. Experimental synthesis and prototyping approach was used to achieve the research objectives. A simulated environment called Mininet provided the implementation test bed. Internet control message packets were the test data to show how multi-protocol label switching labels are added and stripped. An illustration of the packet capture information from the experiment was presented and analyzed.