Dynamic constrained multipath routing for MPLS networks

Abstract

Multipath routing employs multiple parallel paths between a traffic source and destination in order to relax the most heavily congested link in the Internet backbone. A large bandwidth path can be easily set up too. Although multipath routing is useful, the total network resources, i.e. sum of link bandwidths consumed, could be wasted when the acquired path is larger(in terms of number of hops) than the conventional shortest path. In addition, even though we can accommodate more traffic by establishing more paths between the same node pair, it is advised to limit the number of paths for practical reasons such as manageability. This paper presents a heuristic algorithm for hop-count and path count constrained dynamic multipath routing. The objective we adopted in this paper is to minimize the maximum of link utilization. We also obtain the traffic split ratio among the paths, for routers based on traffic partitioning by hashing at the flow level. The extensive simulation results show that the proposed algorithm always minimizes the maximum of link utilization and reduces the number of blocked requests.