VCID notification for label switching

Label switching technology enables high performance and flexible layer-3 pa cket forwarding using the fixed length label information mapped to the corr esponding layer-3 packet stream. A Label Switching Router (LSR), applying l abel switching technology, for wards layer-3 packets either by their layer- 3 address information or by their label information mapped to the layer-3 a ddress information. In order to apply label switching technology to ATM lin ks, we have introduced a new identifier called a Virtual Connection ID (VCI D). The VCID value is shared between the neighboring LSR nodes. This paper proposes a VCID notification procedure and evaluates the performance of LSP (Label Switching Path) establishment with the VCID notification procedure, The prototype system can establish 142.9 LSPs in one second with PVC opera tion, and 10.53 LSPs in one second with SVC operation. Of the entire LSP es tablishment procedure, the VCID notification procedure contributes only 3 m s, corresponding to only 3% of the entire LSP establishment procedure with SVC operation. Evaluation using a real traffic trace between Japan and the U.S. shows that the required maximum number for LSP establishment is 17 per second. With SVC operation, the prototype system will not be able to achie ve sufficient performance with regard to LSP establishment. Since the contr ibution by the ATM signaling is large, i.e., 88 ms (= 92.6%), we need to im prove the performance of ATM signaling with SVC operation.