International Journal of Computing and Network Technology ISSN 2210-1519 Int. J. Com. Net. Teach. 3, No. 1 (Jan. 2015) E-mail: ahsan@nitsri.net, ahmir@nitsri.net http://journals.uob.edu.bh Performance Analysis of Traffic Engineering (TE) in IPv6 with IPv4 over Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) Mohammad Ahsan Chishti 1 and Ajaz Hussain Mir 2 1 Computer Science and Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology Srinagar, Kashmir, India 2 Electronics and Communication Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology Srinagar, Kashmir, India Received: 15 Sept .2014, Revised: 5 Dec. 2014, Accepted: 15 Dec. 2014, Published: 1 Jan. 2015 Abstract: The emergence of next generation protocol (IPv6) and MPLS has been seen as technologies that will drive the next generation networks. Together with Traffic Engineering (TE), Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for high bandwidth consuming flows as well as optimization of network performance can be achieved. Traffic engineering delivers the traffic flows in a network without jamming and provides better network resiliency for failures. In this paper, performance analysis has been done to investigate the traffic engineering outcome in sample scenarios. Investigations were done on IPv4 as well as IPv6 based MPLS networks with and without Traffic Engineering approach involving six scenarios. Parameters such as queuing delay, link delay, Label Switched Path (LSP) delay, packet loss and utilization were evaluated for these scenarios using simulations. The results obtained reveal the applicability as well as usefulness in employing Traffic Engineering in MPLS and also the performance of it with respect to the two addressing protocols of IPv4 and IPv6. Keywords: MPLS, IPv6, Traffic Engineering, TE, MPLS-TE, OPNET, QoS 1. INTRODUCTION Due to variety of traffic flows in the Internet, there has always been a need for Quality of Service requirements for these flows. These traffic flows which are mostly real-time require certain constraints like high throughput, minimum delay etc. To provide these constraints, it is not always possible to replace the routers or media as it might be costly or time consuming. Internet Protocol (IP) was started as a connectionless network layer protocol with no differentiation between various flows [1-2]. MPLS is one of the technologies that will help in providing better QoS for these traffic flows. MPLS was developed in 2001 by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for enhanced and fast packet-forwarding. MPLS defines a label which is small in size and can work with any underlying protocol. It provides connection-oriented Label Switched Path (LSP) for flow of traffic. With MPLS, explicit paths can be used to route the traffic which helps in load balancing. MPLS provides various features in addition to QoS like VPNs etc. and it has introduced an important technology that is Traffic Engineering (TE) which plays an important part in minimizing the overcrowding of networks. Traditional IP tries to send the packet to its destination as soon as possible, therefore choosing a best path for the flows that is the shortest path. However, this path need not always be the best path for the flows. Even though there are multiple redundant paths available in a network for traffic flows but due to the limitations of the routing protocol, only specific routes are utilized like the shortest path in OSPF routing protocol. This creates extensive congestion in the network, resulting in packet loss, long delays, and lesser throughput. Traffic engineering with its explicit paths can alleviate this problem of congestion of links as a traffic management scheme. With Traffic Engineering, MPLS provides various solutions to these problems by Source-based routing, efficient traffic routing through the network by avoiding over-utilized/under-utilized links and automatic adaptation to changing bandwidth [3]. Due to the tremendous growth of devices over the Internet, the available IPv4 addresses have depleted. Therefore, a newer version of Internet Protocol known as IPv6 has been introduced as replacement for IPv4. In addition to large number of addresses, IPv6 provides better security, stateless auto configuration, better optimization, scalability etc. Several integration mechanisms have been developed to leverage an existing IPv4 MPLS network into IPv6 based MPLS network. The conducted simulations of both IPv4 as well as IPv6 addressing protocols, compare the two by