An Architecture for Experimenting with Traffic Engineering and QoS Routing Algorithms

The Internet research community is making a great effort in order to define efficient network management and control functions. The goal is to make the best use of the network infrastructure, while meeting the users' requirements at the same time. One of the keys to achieve such a goal is the routing algorithm. A wide variety of traffic engineering and QoS routing algorithms have been proposed aiming to optimize resources and provide QoS to the users. However, the performance of such algorithms have usually been evaluated through simulations. In this paper, we present an architecture which enables to experiment with different routing algorithms in a real network. The performance of the routing algorithms can then be evaluated in terms of number of admitted flow requests, average delay, packet loss and jitter. We describe how we implemented all the components of the proposed architecture and how we setup a testbed consisting of Linux PCs. Finally, we illustrate an experiment we conducted to demonstrate the operation of our architecture.