Aggregation of data flows on switched network paths

摘要

In networks that use the label switching paradigm, labels are typically allocated to a "flow", where a flow is identified as an end-to-end connection between two or more user applications. This approach may quickly lead to exhaustion of the label space, because the number of user connections across a network is unbounded and hence can be too numerous. Moreover, this requires that the setup and teardown procedures be exercised for each user connection. This demands large amounts of resources (in terms of labels, memory and processing) from the network devices. An important objective of this inventive proposal is to reduce the consumption of labels in a network. Several methods are identified through which multiple flows that traverse the same network hops can use a single connection through the network to transport data from the ingress to the egress point of a network. In other words, the flows are "aggregated" onto a single connection from an ingress to an egress point of a network. Consequently, this helps in reducing the labels usage by several degrees and similarly the setup and teardown work by the same order.