Performance Comparison of IP, MPLS and ATM Based Network Cores using OPNET

Hafiz M. Asif1 and Md. Golam Kaosar2

Department of Computer Engineering, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals Dhahran 31261, KSA upmhafiz@ccse.kfupm.edu.sa1, kaosar@ccse.kfupm.edu.sa2

Abstract - The core components of a network play vital role in its enhancement. For launching and providing Internet applications and services, vendors have come up with a variety of different technology based network cores and other components of Internet backbone. Among all the challenges for an efficient network core, traffic-routing is the most important. Both the routing algorithms and the routertechnology are supposed to perform efficiently. We find that there are a number of technologies that offer packet routing service of which IP, ATM and MPLS are prominent. Some of the routers are designed to provide delivery of specific kind of traffic. The percentage of real time traffic (voice and video) over Internet is rapidly increasing due to growing trend of using real-time traffic oriented applications. People want to talk, watch TV, do video conferencing etc over Internet. This kind of real time traffic requires extra care because of more delay sensitivity, minimum QoS requirements and limited bandwidth. ATM and MPLS have some especial features to support real time traffic. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to replace already existing IP based network and Internet. Therefore numerous new features have been introduced in IP technology to support real time traffic. Thus, we find enough motivation to compare these three technologies in terms of their routing capability based on different performance metrics using OPNET simulator. We find that ATM and MPLS outperform pure IP (without modification) in terms of delay and response time to the exposed data.

in general, researchers are facing another challenge due to rapid increase in the usage of multimedia traffic (voice/video) over the Internet. The goal of this paper is to analyze the performance comparison of IP, ATM and MPLS based network cores when exposed to multimedia traffic. Our simulation study shows that MPLS and ATM outperform IP with respect to most of the selected performance metrics. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we briefly review three routers / switches based on certain key characteristics. In Section III, we describe the simulation model and traffic scenarios. We then present the simulation results and evaluate the performance of different queuing disciplines in Section IV. Finally, we conclude our paper in Section V. II NETWORK CORE

INTRODUCTION

The core components of a network play key role as far as overall network performance is concerned and it has nothing to do with end systems. The technology used for routing can also make significant difference. Currently, we have three main technologies for routing used in network cores: IP, ATM and MPLS based routing. IP is the oldest and highly used in network cores and a lot has been done and still research is going on it for further improvement. In order to enhance IP performance, various modifications to the routing techniques were proposed [1]. Similarly ATM and MPLS implementations were also carried out [2-4]. Moreover, the hybrid approach has also been studied in [5-7]. IP is still leading among them due to its pre-diverse usage and has grown relative features with which ATM and MPLS tried to dominate. Along with network core optimization problem

A network core is backbone of the entire network into which other personal or enterprise networks inject data. Design and capacity of the network core must be robust to serve all the connected subnets or independent nodes efficiently. Therefore, the core usually consists of high capacity links and efficient routing devices. We consider IP, ATM and MPLS based network cores in our work to see their effect on the network performance. IP based network core is designed to give efficient service based on certain features like best effort delivery, dynamic path establishment etc. Such a core shows poor performance at the time of congestion. On the other hand, ATM and MPLS tackle this problem in an efficient manner by making use of virtual path establishment and layered architecture approach. Owing to more careful strategies about delay and efficient use of available bandwidth, these cores are well suited for multimedia traffic. The key idea of enhanced performance of ATM is its well-defined structure with exact degree of description about payload and other packet format. It is a cell based network protocol which encodes data traffic into fixed size cells. The frame size is 53 bytes where 48 bytes are data and the rest are for header information. It is, unlike IP, a connection-oriented technology, in which a connection is established between the two endpoints before the transfer of actual data starts. ATM supports several classes of

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service to provide prioritization to certain type of data such as voice, video etc. Therefore, as mentioned earlier, it ensures QoS to real time traffic. However, this improvement is achieved in IP by making use of very high speed links available today (but we do not take this improvement into consideration for the sake of comparison). Similar to ATM, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) has been evolved to ensure some solutions to network problems like speed, scalability, traffic engineering and quality of service management with architecture different to that of ATM. More details about these technologies can be found in [8, 9]. III A METHODOLOGY AND APPROACH

TABLE 1

Link Speed Average FTP file size FTP data rate Packet Size Video frame rate Video frame size Video data rate Voice data rate Voice codec Video codec

10Mbps 5000 Bytes 100kbps 2KByte 10 fps 128x144 pixels 56kbps 8kbps G.729 H.263

Simulation Model We used OPNET Simulator to compare the three network cores. OPNET is a real time simulator specifically designed for network design and analysis. For our experiment, we consider a hypothetical network model. The core of the network consists of a number of routers in each of the three cases (ATM, IP, and MPLS). There are three types of traffic: FTP, VOICE and VIDEO on client sides with three corresponding servers on the receiving end. Table 1 shows the typical values and parameters of our traffic model. Note that the given data rates are just a typical value for one run which are varied to observe the performance metrics. In order to demonstrate the performance of the core consisting of a particular kind of routers in each of three scenarios, we considered a hypothetical network topology as illustrated in Fig. 1. The core of the network consists of routers of ATM, IP, and MPLS for each single scenario. All clients (FTP, VOICE and VIDEO) were connected to the leftmost edge router whereas the single server was connected to the right edge router.

For FTP traffic, we used exponential distribution for packet arrival, constant packet size and best-effort type of service. We use low resolution video starting at 10 fps (frames per sec) arrival rate and 128x120 pixels and keep increasing this rate and size. The ToS is Streaming Multimedia. For voice traffic, the voice encoder scheme is G.729, the silence and talk spurt lengths are exponentially distributed and ToS is Interactive Voice. All these settings were made using OPNET Application Attributes Profile. There are basically five types of delay that contribute to the overall end-to-end delay i.e. forwarding, propagation, queuing, packetization, and serialization. Forwarding delay is technology dependent and is measured in tens or hundreds of seconds (0.000001 sec). Propagation delay is trivial to calculate provided link speed and packet size are given. Serialization delay is the time it takes to place the bits of a packet onto the link when a router transmits a packet. It depends on packet size and link speed and typical value is around 1 msec [10]. Queuing delay is the time a packet has to wait in a queue and it can vary over time between zero seconds for a noncongested link, to the sum of the times that it takes to transmit each of the other packets that are queued ahead of it [10]. For Cisco routers, its typical value is around 8 msec for real time traffic. B Performance Metrics We use the following metrics for comparison and analysis purpose: Delay (sec) represents end-to-end delay. It is the summation of all delays discussed in previous section. Throughput (pps) represents the total number of packets forwarded to higher layers per second. Utilization represents percentage of the consumption of an available channel bandwidth where a value of 100.0 would indicate full usage.

Fig. 1 Network Topology for Simulation

FTP Download Response Time (sec) is the time between the request for channel is made and when the system starts download file. Normalized Delivered Traffic It is the number of correctly received packets normalized by sent packets from all clients. It indirectly shows the percentage of the dropped traffic over the network during simulation. For analysis purpose, we set the maximum queue size to be 500 packets. IV A SIMULATION RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

our earlier conclusion that ATM is supposed to be fit for real time traffic due to its prior path establishment feature. Finally, the quality of the real time traffic, especially for voice data, is deteriorated on such a high value of the delay.
750
IP M PLS ATM

600

Delay (msec)

450

Throughput Throughput depends on link speed and nature of the technology being used to transmit the data. We can see from the Fig. 2 that the throughput increases linearly with load until the channel gets saturated. Afterwards, it almost remains almost constant in cases of ATM and MPLS but there is an observable decrease in the case of IP due to both its connectionless nature and heavy packet drop that may be because of congestion. Moreover, IP does produce relatively less throughput on account of its connectionless and best effort service characteristics. On the other hand, there is a virtual path defined for each packet in ATM and MPLS based network cores (each router / switch) which is responsible for the reduction of unreliability factor and thus improvement in overall network performance.
60 50 IP MPLS ATM

300

150

0 20 30 40 50 100 200

Load
Fig. 3 Average End-to-End Delay of the Network

Throughput (kpps)

40 30

Utilization This is one of the key metrics to check the efficiency of the technology. This weighs how efficiently the technology makes use of the available resources such as bandwidth etc. The general trend of the utilization is to linearly increase with load till the point of saturation is reached (Fig. 4). Note that IP relatively makes good use of the
1.2 IP MPLS ATM

20
0.8

10 0 10 20 30 40 50 100 200

Utilization

0.6

0.4

Load (kpps)
0.2

Fig. 2 Throughput of the Network

Delay The absence of virtual connection is the key reason of relatively larger delay in IP based cores especially when compared with ATM, which has been clearly depicted in Fig. 3. MPLS falls between these two although its behavior is similar to that of ATM. This, in turn, verifies

0 20 30 40 50 100 200

Load
Fig. 4 Utilization of the Network versus Load

available bandwidth although it produces lower throughput. This is because number of packets is large in case of IP compared to other two technologies because of no prior path establishment time. Moreover, IP router needs extra bandwidth in order to run routing algorithm several times to predict the best available path. Relatively less utilization of ATM and MPLS does not mean inefficiency. Instead it will benefit at the time of congestion and overloading situations. D FTP Download Response Time As mentioned earlier in section 2, ATM gives best response to all kinds of traffic. It means that there is little delay required to initiate the conversation and to let the client start sending its data. As shown in Fig. 5, FTP response time of ATM is considerably less compared to other two technologies. IP based core shows the worst behavior because of its random path detection (there is no virtual circuit in IP). This feature is very useful and can be exploited well for real time traffic such as voice and video. This directly takes us to the conclusion that ATM gives better performance for real time traffic as far any type of delay is concerned.
35 30 IP MPLS ATM

normalized by traffic sent is significantly low. On the other hand, we make full use of connection-oriented nature of other two technologies thereby reducing dropped traffic to almost nil. Moreover, it is important to note that there is a gradual decrease in the received traffic common to all network cores with the increase in offered load due to capacity limit, network environment and some other reasons e.g. poor performance at physical layer etc. It is also important to mention that the current IP based network cores do not depict such a poor performance on account of improved IPv6 architecture and some other technology advancement which we did not include in our simulation. As mentioned earlier, we compare IPv4 versus ATM and MPLS because we also do not consider the recent improvements made in ATM and MPLS.
1.1 1
IP MPLS ATM

Received Traffic

0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 20 30 40 50 100 200

Response time (msec)

25 20 15 10 5

Load
Fig. 6 Normalized Received Traffic Comparison of IP, MPLS and ATM technologies

V
0 20 30 40 50 100 200

CONCLUSIONS

Load
Fig. 5 FTP Download Response Time for IP, ATM and MPLS

Normalized Traffic Received We can see the effect of connectionless and connectionoriented features of IP and other two technologies respectively by examining Fig. 6. Connectionless behavior of IP is responsible for more drop at the time of congestion (e.g. at 50kpps). However, it is not always the case i.e. IP device tries to avoid congestion by running congestion avoidance mechanism which most of the time works efficiently. Therefore, we can see from Fig. 6 that there is only one short interval of time where the received traffic

The structure of ATM and IP is entirely different (we used IPv4 in our simulation). ATM virtually establishes route before the transmission starts whereas IP randomly (or on demand) establishes routes for the packets to be transmitted by running routing algorithm (Dijkstra, DV etc.). This feature makes a subtle difference in the performance depicted by these two protocols. Dominance and outclass performance of ATM over IP with respect to end to end delay, throughput and download response time clearly shows that prior establishment has a lot of advantages. One of the reasons of seldom use of ATM for Internet cores is because of the difficulty to replace the existing IP infrastructure which is widely spread all over the Internet. Moreover, the enhancement of IPv6 has also made possible to overcome the demerits that we showed in our simulation due to IPv4 structure.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to thank KFUPM (King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals) for its support. Special thanks must go to Dr. Abdul Waheed for his valuable pieces of advice during the course of simulation. Finally, we would also like to thank Muzibur Rehman working at KFUPM for his contribution in early survey work of this paper. REFERENCES
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