Demand Engineering: An new approach to SDN-based traffic management for IP and MPLS networks

Traffic engineering has been used in IP / MPLS networks for a number of years as a tool for making more efficient use of capacity by explicitly routing traffic demands where there is available network capacity that would otherwise be unused. Deployment of traffic engineering imposes an additional layer of complexity to network design and operations, however, which has constrained its adoption for capacity optimisation. The rise of software defined networks (SDN) has renewed interest in the use of traffic engineering approaches leveraging centralised network controllers for capacity optimisation.