Analysis and improvements to mate algorithm

Abstract

This paper describes an implementation, analysis and improvements to MATE (MPLS adaptive traffic engineering) algorithm. MATE is an on-line load balancing algorithm. As MATE was originally thought for constant average incoming traffic, the first improvement is the usage of an adaptive update step size for time varying traffic. The second one modifies the time interval between updates to adequate itself to the traffic characteristics and calculates the amount of measurements in each interval to have a reliable statistic. The original algorithm and the new version, which would be called MATE-TV (MATE for time-varying traffic), were implemented in a LINUX-MPLS network, using the 'mpls-linux' packet distributed by Source Forge.