An Enhanced Traffic Split Routing Heuristic for Layer 2 and Layer 1 Services

Abstract

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have now taken an important place in computer and communication networks. A virtual private network is the extension of a private network that encompasses links through shared or public networks, such as the Internet. A VPN is a transmission network service for businesses with two or more remote locations. It offers a range of access speeds and options depending on the needs of each site. This service supports voice, data and video and is fully managed by the service provider, including routing equipment installed at the customer's premises. According to its characteristics, VPN has widely deployed on "COVID-19" offering extensive services to connect roaming employees to their corporate networks and have access to all the company information and applications. Hence, VPN focuses on two important issues such as security and Quality-of-Service. This latter has a direct relationship with network performance such as delay, bandwidth, throughput, and jitter. Traditionally, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) accommodate static point-to-point resource demand, named, Layer 1 VPN (L1VPN). The primary disadvantage of L1VPN is that the data plane connectivity does not guarantee control plane connectivity. Layer 2 VPN is designed to provide end-to-end layer 2 connection by transporting layer 2 frames between distributed sites. An L2VPN is suitable for supporting heterogeneous higher-level protocols. In this paper we propose an enhanced routing protocol based on Traffic Split Routing (TSR) and Shortest Path Routing (SPR) algorithms. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme outperforms the Shortest Path Routing (SPR) in term of network resources. Indeed, 72% of network links are used by the Enhanced Traffic Split Routing compared to Shortest Path Routing (SPR) which only used 44% of the network links.