A lightweight implementation of RSVP-TE protocol for MPLS-TE signaling

Traffic engineering based on an MPLS technology is being introduced for providing high quality-guaranteed services over the Internet. As one of MPLS signaling protocols for traffic engineering, a RSVP-TE protocol transmits and receives periodic refresh messages for maintaining the connection state of a flow-based path. Such a soft state characteristic gives a heavy processing overhead to routers for maintaining connection states in case of being a large number of paths established. In this paper, we propose a lightweight implementation approach of a RSVP-TE protocol reducing processing overhead on periodic messages by adapting the Hello mechanism. We evaluate the processing overhead of the implemented lightweight RSVP-TE protocol compared with the refresh reduction scheme. Our evaluation results show that the proposed RSVP-TE protocol can manage a large number of LSP states without increasing overhead of refresh messages.