Method for traffic engineering and ingress router adapted to perform such a method

An ingress router of a packet network, comprising:

• a classifier which determines a service class for each received packet to be stored in a service class queue based on the determined service class:
• a look-up device which identifies a part of the received packets as special packets which are to be transferred from the ingress router to an egress router in a dedicated tunnel, separately from a remainder of the received packets:
• at least one tunnel queue dedicated and associated to said dedicated tunnels, to temporarily store the identified part of the received packets;
• and
• at least one tunnel shaper, associated to said dedicated tunnel which tunnel shaper shapes the identified part of the received packets of said dedicated tunnel before transmitting.

A method, comprising:

• reading identification information in each incoming packet at an ingress router which includes a first queue set and a second queue set, each queue in the first and second set is associated with a corresponding service class;
• identifying a service class of the incoming packets based on the identification information;
• classifying the incoming packets into one of standard packets or special packets based on the identification information, the special packets are to be transmitted in a dedicated ingress tunnel between the ingress router and an egress router;
• prior to transmitting the packets, storing the packets in a queue of one of the first queue set if the packet is classified as the standard packet or the second queue set if the packet is classified as the special packet, based on the identified service class;
• shaping the special packet stored in the queue of the second queue set;
• transmitting the standard packets from the queues of the first queue set via an ingress general tunnel;
• and
• transmitting the special packets from the queues of the second queue set via the dedicated ingress tunnel coupled to the second queue set.