Enhanced crankback signaling for multi-domain traffic engineering

Multi-domain traffic engineering is a major focus area for carriers today and crankback signaling offers a very promising and viable alternative here. Although some initial crankback studies have been done, there is still significant latitude for improving multi-domain crankback performance. To address these concerns, this paper studies realistic IP/MPLS multi-domain networks and proposes a novel solution for joint intra/inter-domain signaling crankback. Namely, dynamic intra-domain link-state routing information is coupled with inter-domain path/distance-vector routing state to improve the overall search process. Mechanisms are also introduced to limit setup signaling overheads/delays. The performance of the proposed solution is then analyzed using simulation and compared against other crankback techniques as well as hierarchical inter-domain routing strategies.