Nov 29 2008
Traffic Engineering – Introduction
Informational RFC 3272 provides an overview of Traffic Engineering.
Traffic Engineering(TE) is different to network engineering in that TE is concerned about engineering/manipulating traffic flows across the network.
If you think about a road system, network engineering is similar to that of building the roads themselves. Where as TE is analogous to placing the traffic lights, roundabouts and diversions.
In its inception the focus of TE was managing congested networks. Traditional IP networks utilising a link state protocol such as OSPF do not take into account the congestion or utilisation of a link as part of the SPF calculation. TE was seen as a solution to this paradigm, however as like most technologies, TE has evolved to provide other more usefull services to the Traffic Engineer.
Services such as Fast Reroute, load balancing, auto-bandwidth, QoS MPLS TE to name a few.
Most Service Providers today tend to over engineer their networks and not rely on TE to squeeze every bit out of the current network. A network which is 100% utilised is actually putting customer services at risk. If any device or link fails you need idle capacity to reroute and maintain uptime.
