An analysis of scaling issues in MPLS-TE backbone networks
Traffic engineered Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS-TE) is being deployed in providers' backbone networks. The providers wish to grow these networks, and need to discover whether existing protocols and implementations can support the network sizes that they are planning. This document presents an analysis of some of the scaling concerns for MPLS-TE backbone networks, and examines the value of two techniques for improving scaling. The intention is to motivate the development of appropriate deployment techniques and protocol extensions to enable the applicaiton of MPLS-TE in large networks. This document considers only scalability for point-to-point MPLS-TE. Point-to-multipoint MPLS-TE is for future study.