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 router-
technology 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.
I 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
1-4244-0322-7/06/$20.00 2006 IEEE
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
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
service to provide prioritization to certain type of data TABLE 1
such as voice, video etc. Therefore, as mentioned earlier, Link Speed 10Mbps
it ensures QoS to real time traffic. However, this Average FTP file size 5000 Bytes
improvement is achieved in IP by making use of very high
speed links available today (but we do not take this FTP data rate 100kbps
improvement into consideration for the sake of
Packet Size 2KByte
comparison). Similar to ATM, Multiprotocol Label
Switching (MPLS) has been evolved to ensure some Video frame rate 10 fps
solutions to network problems like speed, scalability,
Video frame size 128x144 pixels
traffic engineering and quality of service management with
architecture different to that of ATM. More details about Video data rate 56kbps
these technologies can be found in [8, 9].
Voice data rate 8kbps
III METHODOLOGY AND APPROACH Voice codec G.729
Video codec H.263
A Simulation Model
We used OPNET Simulator to compare the three
For FTP traffic, we used exponential distribution for
network cores. OPNET is a real time simulator
packet arrival, constant packet size and best-effort type of
specifically designed for network design and analysis. For
service. We use low resolution video starting at 10 fps
our experiment, we consider a hypothetical network
(frames per sec) arrival rate and 128x120 pixels and keep
model. The core of the network consists of a number of
increasing this rate and size. The ToS is Streaming
routers in each of the three cases (ATM, IP, and MPLS).
Multimedia. For voice traffic, the voice encoder scheme is
There are three types of traffic: FTP, VOICE and VIDEO
G.729, the silence and talk spurt lengths are exponentially
on client sides with three corresponding servers on the
distributed and ToS is Interactive Voice. All these settings
receiving end. Table 1 shows the typical values and
were made using OPNET Application Attributes Profile.
parameters of our traffic model. Note that the given data
There are basically five types of delay that contribute to
rates are just a typical value for one run which are varied
the overall end-to-end delay i.e. forwarding, propagation,
to observe the performance metrics.
queuing, packetization, and serialization. Forwarding
In order to demonstrate the performance of the core
delay is technology dependent and is measured in tens or
consisting of a particular kind of routers in each of three
hundreds of seconds (0.000001 sec). Propagation delay is
scenarios, we considered a hypothetical network topology
trivial to calculate provided link speed and packet size are
as illustrated in Fig. 1. The core of the network consists
given. Serialization delay is the time it takes to place the
of routers of ATM, IP, and MPLS for each single scenario.
bits of a packet onto the link when a router transmits a
All clients (FTP, VOICE and VIDEO) were connected to
packet. It depends on packet size and link speed and
the leftmost edge router whereas the single server was
typical value is around 1 msec [10]. Queuing delay is the
connected to the right edge router.
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 our earlier conclusion that ATM is supposed to be fit for
between the request for channel is made and real time traffic due to its prior path establishment feature.
when the system starts download file. Finally, the quality of the real time traffic, especially for

Normalized Delivered Traffic It is the number of voice data, is deteriorated on such a high value of the
correctly received packets normalized by sent delay.
packets from all clients. It indirectly shows the
percentage of the dropped traffic over the 750
network during simulation. IP
M PLS
ATM
600
For analysis purpose, we set the maximum queue size to
be 500 packets.

Delay (msec)
450
IV SIMULATION RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

A Throughput 300
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 150
load until the channel gets saturated. Afterwards, it almost
remains almost constant in cases of ATM and MPLS but
0
there is an observable decrease in the case of IP due to
20 30 40 50 100 200
both its connectionless nature and heavy packet drop that
may be because of congestion. Moreover, IP does produce Load
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 Fig. 3 Average End-to-End Delay of the Network
MPLS based network cores (each router / switch) which is
responsible for the reduction of unreliability factor and C Utilization
thus improvement in overall network performance. This is one of the key metrics to check the efficiency of
the technology. This weighs how efficiently the
60 technology makes use of the available resources such as
IP bandwidth etc.
MPLS
50 ATM The general trend of the utilization is to linearly
increase with load till the point of saturation is reached
Throughput (kpps)

(Fig. 4). Note that IP relatively makes good use of the

40
1.2
IP
30 MPLS
ATM
1

20
0.8
Utilization

10
0.6
0
10 20 30 40 50 100 200
0.4
Load (kpps)
0.2

Fig. 2 Throughput of the Network

B Delay 0
The absence of virtual connection is the key reason of 20 30 40 50 100 200
relatively larger delay in IP based cores especially when
Load
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 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
IP
30 MPLS
ATM
Response time (msec)
25
20
15
10
5
0
20 30 40 50 100 200
Load
Fig. 5 FTP Download Response Time for IP, ATM and MPLS
E Normalized Traffic Received
We can see the effect of connectionless and connection-
oriented 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
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
IP
MPLS
ATM
1
Received Traffic
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
20 30 40 50 100 200
Load
Fig. 6 Normalized Received Traffic Comparison of IP, MPLS and
ATM technologies
V CONCLUSIONS
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.
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