This study investigates how the Constraint-based routing decision granularity significantly affects the scalability and blocking performance of QoS routing in MPLS network. The coarse-grained granularity, such as per-destination, has lower storage and computational overheads but is only suitable for best-effort traffic. On the other hand, the finegrained granularity, such as per-flow, provides lower blocking probability for bandwidth requests, but requires a huge number of states and high computational cost.
To achieve cost-effective scalability, this study proposes using hybrid granularity schemes. The Overflowed cache of the per-pair/flow scheme adds a per-pair cache and a per-flow cache as the routing cache, and performs well in blocking probability with a reasonable overflow ratio of 10% as offered load=0.7. Per-pair/class scheme groups the flows into several paths using routing marks, thus allowing packets to be labelforwarded with a bounded cache.