Over the years, the Internet has emerged as an indispensable platform for information exchange. As availability increases, development of new applications generate enormous volumes of traffic. Such growth continually taxes service provider resources. A common and effective resource management option deployed by several service providers is Multi-Protocol Label Switched (MPLS) based Traffic Engineering (TE).;This dissertation proposes new MPLS based TE mechanisms capable of dealing with traffic changes, such as growth and shifts. Specifically, new techniques for dynamic bandwidth allocation and routing are proposed and developed through simulations under failure and non-failure scenarios. Issues related to inter-domain deployment are also studied and finally, an experimental testbed setup is proposed and implemented for realistic small scale testing.;A new traffic engineering technique involving the coupling of dynamic bandwidth allocation with rerouting to find the best path for the current traffic is proposed. Realistic topologies and traffic profiles are used for detailed analysis and comparisons with existing techniques. Performance analysis is also undertaken in an International network scenario carrying a mix of voice and data traffic across several timezones. Several key issues are highlighted after studying underlying network dynamics such as signaling overhead, router load, traffic path quality, etc. Keeping these issues in mind, a new trend-based bandwidth reservation mechanism is proposed. The problem of inter-domain TE is analyzed next. Existing inter-domain path computation approaches, signaling and path setup issues are studied, quantified and compared. Lastly, the functional prototype of a testbed architecture consisting of Cisco routers and Linux boxes is presented. A new Java based API that has been developed to configure the testbed and deploy new mechanisms is also discussed.
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