| Summary: | The Internet has proven to be a major contributor to the world and has had a significant impact on many aspects of our lives over the past decades. It continues to have the potential to impact societies, businesses and governments in different ways. Despite the clear significance of Internet as a key enabler of a big technological revolution, there are rising challenges associated with the exponential growth of the Internet. In addition, accelerated in part by the massive increase in devices and the capabilities of those devices, Internet traffic is increasingly becoming more dynamic and demanding. Meanwhile, users expect a quality delivery facilitated by service providers across the mobile networks from core to access. Internet Protocol (IP) as the underlying foundation for the next-generation networks is becoming increasingly relevant considering the ubiquitous installed IP infrastructure. Correspondingly, different suggestions are being explored about the facilitation of next-generation access networks via IP mechanisms, with a growing trend towards a flat IP structure and novel topological set-ups in the backhaul. With the expected surge in global IP traffic, service providers would need to adapt accordingly to operate disruption and loss free networks supported with the developing IP infrastructure. This calls for a consistent routing optimization strategy to minimize loss in data transmission. Hence, a resilient, efficient and easily implementable routing paradigm that employs suitable Traffic Engineering (TE) techniques aligned with the developing nature of future access networks must be applied. It becomes imperative that the routing considerations for IP access networks converge with the ones found in conventional intra-domain routing. Multi-Plane Routing (MPR) is a routing optimization approach that consolidates various aspects in an all-IP access network infrastructure and consists of both offline and online TE approaches. MPR integrates the recent multi-topology approach that leverages multiple alternative paths (for each Ingress-Egress pair) through a network that divides the physical network topology into several logical routing planes facilitating path diversity. In this thesis, MPR is extended from a practical prospective in line with the architectural evolution of access networks and the introduction of new traffic types and applications. The offline and online TE strategies of MPR have been modified to suit the flattened network architecture. Correspondingly, a MPR-based TE approach is proposed considering two different scenarios to reflect the evolution in the architectural design of access network structures under a realistic traffic scenario. It becomes evident that for ranges of topologies, MPR’s utilization of the whole topology in building path diversity in networks, allows for significant improvement of networks’ capacity, performance and support for meshing. Moreover, with the rise of different traffic types of various nature, Quality of Service (QoS) is increasingly becoming important. Tactile Internet is considered in this thesis in addition to other traffic applications. To this end, a novel routing technique which accommodates for the strict requirements of this new traffic type in access networks architectures will be proposed. Validation of the proposed techniques through simulations have been performed and presented, illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
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