An efficient multipath forwarding method

Abstract

We motivate and formally define dynamic multipath routing and present the problem of packet forwarding in the multipath routing context. We demonstrate that for multipath sets that are suffix matched, forwarding can be efficiently implemented with (1) a per packet overhead of a small, fixed-length path identifier, and (2) router space overhead linear in K, the number of alternate paths between a source and a destination. We derive multipath forwarding schemes for suffix matched path sets computed by both de-centralized (link-state) and distributed (distance-vector) routing algorithms. We also prove that (1) distributed multipath routing algorithms compute suffix matched multipath sets, and (2) for the criterion of ranked k-shortest paths, decentralized routing algorithms also yield suffix matched multipath sets.