Traffic Engineering and Quality of Experience in MPLS Network by Fuzzy Logic characterization

Satya Prakash Rout Int. Journal of Engineering Research and Applications www.ijera.com
ISSN: 2248-9622, Vol. 5, Issue 8, (Part - 4) August 2015, pp.119-125
www.ijera.com 119 | P a g e
Traffic Engineering and Quality of Experience in MPLS Network
by Fuzzy Logic characterization
1
Satya Prakash Rout, 2
Palash Ghosal
1
Department of Physics, Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, Prasanthi Nilyam, India
2
Department of Electrical and Electronics Communication, IIT Karagpur, Karagpur, India
Abstract
This paper proposes a load balancing algorithm using fuzzy logic so that maximum Quality of Experience can
be achieved. Avoidance of congestion is one of the major performance objectives of traffic engineering in
MPLS networks. Load balancing can prevent the congestion caused due to inefficient allocation of network
resources. Another aspect of the network performance is Quality of Experience (QoE). QoE in
telecommunications terminology, it is a measurement used to determine how well that network is satisfying the
end user's requirements. The Mean Opinion Score (MOS) is an important factor in determining the QoE. MOS
is a measurement of the quality delivered by the network based on human perception at the destination end.
Specifically we can tell mean opinion score (MOS) provides a numerical indication of the perceived quality of
received media after compression and/or transmission.
Index Terms—QoE, MPLS, WAN, Virtual Links, LSR, MOS, Absolute Delay, Jitter, LSP
I. INTRODUCTION
Traffic engineering is a process that enhances
overall network utilization by attempting to create a
uniform or differentiated distribution of traffic
throughout the network. An important result of this
process is the avoidance of congestion on any one
path. It is important to note that traffic engineering
does not necessarily select the shortest path between
two devices. It is possible that, for two packet data
flows, the packets may traverse completely different
paths even though their originating node and the final
destination node are the same. This way, the less-
exposed or less-used network segments can be used
and differentiated services can be provided. In MPLS,
traffic engineering is inherently provided using
explicitly routed paths. The Label-switched paths
(LSPs) are created independently, specifying different
paths that are based on user-defined policies.
Multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) is a versatile
solution to address the problems faced by present-day
networks-speed, scalability, quality-of-service (QoS)
management and traffic engineering. MPLS has
emerged as an elegant solution to meet the
bandwidth-management and service requirements for
next-generation Internet protocol (IP)–based
backbone networks. MPLS addresses issues related to
scalability and routing (based on QoS and service
quality metrics) and can exist over existing
asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and frame-relay
networks.
Avoidance of congestion is one of the major
performance objectives of traffic engineering in
MPLS networks. Load balancing can prevent the
congestion caused due to inefficient allocation of
network resources. Another aspect of the network
performance is Quality of Experience (QoE). QoE in
telecommunications terminology, it is a measurement
used to determine how well that network is satisfying
the end user's requirements. The Mean Opinion Score
(MOS) is an important factor in determining the QoE.
MOS is a measurement of the quality delivered by the
network based on human perception at the destination
end. Specifically we can tell mean opinion score
(MOS) provides a numerical indication of the
perceived quality of received media after compression
and/or transmission.
II. MULTI-PROTOCOL LABEL
SWITCHING
In computer networking and telecommunications,
Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) refers to a
mechanism which directs and transfers data between
Wide Area Networks (WANs) nodes with high
performance, regardless of the content of the data.
MPLS makes it easy to create "virtual links" between
nodes on the network, regardless of the protocol of
their encapsulated data.
The growing number of computer users on the
Internet and intranets, as well as new bandwidth
intensive applications such as those incorporating
voice and video, are driving the need for guaranteed
bandwidth and increased network reliability. The
typical frame 8520/and packet-based networks lack
the quality of service (QoS) and traffic shaping
sophistication of the powerful yet expensive ATM
networks. Furthermore, the proliferation of network
protocols increases the complexity and reduces
network capability and performance. In an effort to
RESEARCH ARTICLE OPEN ACCESS

increase throughput, reduce network complexity in
ATM networks, and bring advanced bandwidth
shaping and QoS capabilities to non-ATM networks,
the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) created
Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS).MPLS
combines the power of layer 2 switching with the
flexibility and intelligence of layer 3 protocols; it
operates independently of other network technologies
but is fully capable of interoperating with them.
MPLS brings non-ATM networks powerful QoS
capabilities, the ability to route multiple network
technologies (Ethernet, frame relay, ATM) over one
infrastructure and the capability of interoperating with
modern routing protocols such as RIP, OSPF and
BGP, while increasing efficiency and simplifying
network infrastructure.
Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) is a
versatile solution to address the problems faced by
present-day networks—speed, scalability, quality-of-
service (QoS) management and traffic engineering.
MPLS has emerged as an elegant solution to meet the
bandwidth-management and service requirements for
next-generation Internet protocol (IP)–based
backbone networks. MPLS addresses issues related to
scalability and routing (based on QoS and service
quality metrics) and can exist over existing
asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and frame-relay
networks. [1] and [2]. The devices that participate in
the MPLS protocol mechanisms can be classified into
label edge routers (LERs) and label switching routers
(LSRs).
An LSR is a high-speed router device in the core
of an MPLS network that participates in the
establishment of LSPs using the appropriate label
signaling protocol and high-speed switching of the
data traffic based on the established paths.
Figure 1: An MPLS Network
An LER is a device that operates at the edge of
the access network and MPLS network. LERs support
multiple ports connected to dissimilar networks (such
as frame relay, ATM, and Ethernet) and forwards this
traffic on to the MPLS network after establishing
LSPs, using the label signaling protocol at the ingress
and distributing the traffic back to the access
networks at the egress. The LER plays a very
important role in the assignment and removal of
labels, as traffic enters or exits an MPLS network.
III. TRAFFIC ENGINEERING
It is the process that enhances overall network
utilization by attempting to create a uniform or
differentiated distribution of traffic throughout the
network. An important result of this process is the
avoidance of congestion on any one path. It is
important to note that traffic engineering does not
necessarily select the shortest path between two
devices. It is possible that, for two packet data flows,
the packets may traverse completely different paths
even though their originating node and the final
destination node are the same. This way, the less-
exposed or less-used network segments can be used
and differentiated services can be provided. In
MPLS, traffic engineering is inherently provided
using explicitly routed paths. The LSPs are created
independently, specifying different paths that are
based on user-defined policies. However, this may
require extensive operator intervention. RSVP and
CR–LDP are two possible approaches to supply
dynamic traffic engineering and QoS in MPLS. The
Current Internet Gateway Protocols (IGP) uses the
shortest paths to forward traffic. Using shortest paths
conserves network resources, but it causes some
resources of the network to be over utilized while the
others remain underutilized. The shortest paths from
different sources overlap at some links, causing
congestion on those links. The traffic from a source to
a destination exceeds the capacity of the shortest path,
while a longer path between these two routers is
under-utilized. The purpose of traffic engineering [3,
4] is to enhance network utilization and to improve
the architecture (topology and link capacity) of a
network in a systematic way, so that the network is
robust, adaptive and easy to operate. An efficient
traffic engineering solution shares the data traffic load
with the routers, nodes and switches in the network,
making none of its individual components either over
utilized or underutilized, thus assuring satisfactory
service delivery and optimizing resource efficiency.
IV. QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE
Quality of Experience is often used with Quality
of Service terminology are often used interchangeably
but are actually two separate concepts. QoE is the
overall performance of the system from the point of
view of the users. It is the measure of end-to-end
performance at the service level from the user
perspective and an indication of how well the system
meets the user’s needs. Quality of Service(QoS) also
refers to a set of technologies(QoS mechanism) that
enable the network administrator to manage the
effects of congestion as well as providing
differentiated service to selected network traffic flows

or to selected users. In order to deliver acceptable
service quality, QoS targets should be established for
each service and be included early on in system
design and engineering processes. QoE for the end
user is essential and will be a key differentiator with
respect to competing service offerings. Subscribers to
network services don’t care how service quality is
achieved. What matters to them is how well a service
meets their goals and expectations their Quality of
Experience (QoE).To achieve this end, the QoE
engineering process involves the following steps.
 Defining the QoE matrices and targets.
 Identify QoE contributing factors and
dependencies (delay, jitter and loss).
 Traffic engineering and resource allocation. This
involves a control policy for routing, budget
allocation etc. In our case we will introduce a
load balancing algorithm to optimize the
impairments and jitter in order to maximize the
QoE.
YES
QOE ACHIEVED
NO
Figure 2: Engineering Process of Quality of
Experience
As an important measure of the end-to-end
performance at the services level from the user's
perspective the QoE is an important metric for the
design of systems and engineering processes. This is
particularly relevant for video services because bad
network performance may highly affect the user's
experience, mainly because these services are
compressed and have low entropy. So, when
designing systems the expected output, i.e. the
expected QoE, is often taken into account also as a
system output metric.
This QoE metric is often measured at the end
devices and can conceptually be seen as the
remaining quality after the distortion introduced
during the preparation of the content and the delivery
through the network until it reaches the decoder at the
end device. There are several elements in the video
preparation and delivery chain and some of them may
introduce distortion. This causes the degradation of
the content and several elements in this chain can be
considered as "QoE relevant" for video services.
These are the encoding system, transport network,
access network, home network and end device.
The concept of QoE in engineering is also known
as Perceived Quality of Service (PQoS), in the sense
of the QoS as it is finally perceived by the end-user.
The evaluation of the PQoS for audiovisual content
will provide a user with a range of potential choices,
covering the possibilities of low, medium or high
quality levels. Moreover the PQoS evaluation gives
the service provider and network operator the
capability to minimize the storage and network
resources by allocating only the resources that are
sufficient to maintain a specific level of user
satisfaction.
The evaluation of the PQoS is a matter of
objective and subjective evaluation procedures, each
time taking place after the encoding process (post-
encoding evaluation). Subjective quality evaluation
processes (PQoS evaluation) require large amount of
human resources, establishing it as a time-consuming
process. Objective evaluation methods, on the other
hand, can provide PQoS evaluation results faster, but
require large amount of machine resources and
sophisticated apparatus configurations. Towards this,
objective evaluation methods are based and make use
of multiple metrics
IV. A. QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE METRICES
There are two popular methods to accesses
audiovisual quality: Subjective quality assessment
and objective quality assessment. Subjective quality
assessment means playing a sample audiovisual clips
to a number of participants. Their judgment of the
quality of the clip is collected and used as a quality
metric. Objective quality assessment does not rely on
human judgment and involves automated procedures
such as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) measurement of
original and reconstructed signals and other
sophisticated algorithms such as Mean Square Error
(MSE) distortion, Frequency weighted MSE,
Segmented SNR and E-model to determine quality
metrics. The method we are going to adopt in our
work is the E-model. The problem with Subjective
quality assessment techniques is that human
DEFINE QoE MATRICS AND TARGETS
IDENTIFY QoE FACTORS AND
DEPENDENCIES
TRAFFIC ENGINEERING AND RESOURCE
ALLOCATION CONTROL POLICY
QoE TARGET
MET?

perception of quality is based on individual
perception, which can vary significantly between a
given set of individuals. The problem with objective
quality assessment technique is that they may not
necessarily reflect the actual end user experience In
either case the output of these measurements is
MEAN OPINION SCORE (MOS) which ranks the
audiovisual quality on a scale of 1 to 5.here our
objective is to maximize the MOS which is our
metric. The table 1 below shows the audiovisual
quality classes for different MOS values [4].
MOS
USER
SATISFACTION
4.3 to 5 Very satisfied
4 to 4.3 Satisfied
3.6 to 4 Some users
dissatisfied
3.1 to 3.6 Many users
dissatisfied
2.6 to 3.1 Nearly all users
dissatisfied
1 to 2.6 Not recommended
Table 1: Audio Visual Quality Classes
IV.B FACTORS AFFECTING QOE
An important aspect in our problem is identifying
the network parameters that affect QoE the most and
knowing the relative impact of these parameters on
the QoE .Extensive studies have been carried out in
[4] [5] and [13] where it has been established by
objective and subjective experiments on audiovisual
traffic, that the variables which affect the MOS
ranking the most, are the dynamic network changes
caused by route fluctuation, competing traffic and
congestion .This network dynamics can be
characterized by 3 network metrics namely delay
,jitter and loss.
Delay is defined as the amount of time that a
packet takes to travel from sender’s application to the
receiver’s destination application. It is recommended
by [6] and also verified by [4] [5] that delay bounds
for the various grades of perceived performance in
terms of Human interaction can be defined as: GOOD
(0ms –150ms), ACCEPTABLE (150ms-300ms),
POOR (>300ms).
Jitter is defined as the variation in the delay of
the packets arriving at the receiving end. It is caused
due to congestion at various point in the network,
varying packet sizes that result in irregular processing
times of the packets and other such factors.
Loss is defined as the percentage of transmitted
packet that never reach the intended destination due
to deliberately discarded packets or non – deliberately
by intermediate links, nodes, and end–systems. It is
suggested that loss more than 1% can severely affect
audiovisual quality.
V. E-MODEL
The algorithm we will use exploits the E –model
as recommended in ITU-T G.107 [6] which returns a
value for ―Rating factor R‖ which offers an estimate
of the user option called the QoE. The E- model is a
well established computational model that uses the
transmission parameter to predict the subjective
quality .It uses a R scale whose value is from 0 to 100
and can be mapped to MOS rankings and user
satisfaction as shown in the table 3 [6]
R-
value(lower
limit)
MOS(lower
limit)
User
Satisfaction
90 4.34 Very satisfied
80 4.03 Satisfied
70 3.60 Some users
dissatisfied
60 3.10 Many users
dissatisfied
50 2.58 Nearly all users
dissatisfied
Table 2: Relation between R value, MOS and user
Satisfaction
The purpose of the model is:
 to predict the subjective effect of combinations of
impairments using stored information on the
effects of individual impairments
 to help network planners design networks
 to replace hierarchical models and
apportionment, which are difficult to apply in a
liberalized market
The basic equation for the model is: R = Ro – Is
– Id – Ie + A
Where:
Ro= Basic signal-to- noise ratio
Is = Impairments simultaneous to voice signal
Id = Impairments delayed after voice signal
Ie = Effects of special equipment e.g. codecs
A = Advantage factor (to take account of user
advantages such as mobility)
The R factor can be mapped to MOS by the formula,
For R>0: MOS=1
For 0<R<100: MOS=1+0.035R+R(R-60)(100-
R)7.10-6
For R>100 MOS=4.5
As this quantity only affects Id, the objective function
is characterized assuming default values for all other
GOOD
ACCEPTABLE
POOR

impairments except Id and that leads to the following
expression:
R=94- Id
 
1
1 6 6
6 625 1 3 1 2
3
X
Id X
 
   
           
 
lg
10 0
lg 2
Ta
X
 
 
 
Where Ta is the delay
Assuming the M/M/1 model the average delay is
expressed by the following,
/
i
i
Ta
s i
 
 
   
    
   

Where i is the index number of the ith LSP operating
between the ingress and the egress router.
By substituting (4) and (2) in (1), the rating factor
can be characterized as the function of the traffic rate
(λ).The problem is now a maximization problem:
Maximize,
    
1 6
6
3 1 log / / 100 / log2)/ 3 2i s i
i
   
                    

Subject to
i
s i   i  the IE pair
And 0i 
VI. RESULTS AND DICUSSIONS
In the simulation process, we tried to compare
the graphs and results obtained with the defined
standards of ITU-T
Figure 3: ITU-T G.107 relation between MOS and R
Figure 4: Simulation relation between MOS and R
Figure 5: Relation between Absolute Delay and R
factor
      
1 6
6
94 25 1 log / / 100 / log2i s i
i
f     
                           

2
1
3
4
5

Figure 6: ITU-T Relation between Average Delay an
R factor
100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 550 600
3
3.5
4
4.5
Absolute delay Vs MOS
Absolute Delay (ms)
MOS
Figure 7: Relation between Absolute Delay and MOS
Figure 8: Realation between Jitter and R factor
VII. CONCLUSION
Since it is difficult to develop as many
communication solutions as possible applications, the
scientific and technological communities aim towards
providing general services allowing to give to each
application or user a set of properties now-a-days
called ―Quality of Service‖ (QoS), a terminology
lacking a precise definition. This QoS concept takes
different forms according to the type of
communication service and the aspects which matter
for a given application: for performance it comes
through specific metrics (delays, jitter, throughput),
for dependability it also comes through appropriate
metrics: reliability, availability; vulnerability for
instance in the case of WAN (Wide Area Network)
topologies, etc. At the conclusion we can tell that
QoE is a subjective measure of performance in a
system. QoE relies on human opinion and differs
from quality of service (QoS), which can be precisely
measured. For example, a person's reaction to
listening to music through headphones is based not
only on the frequency response of the system and the
speakers, but the comfort of the unit and the
individual's hearing sensitivity.
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