Performance of fast bandwidth reservation with multipath routing

The authors propose an analysis for computing the burst blocking probability for each end-to-end connection in an ATM network where multipath (MP) routing is used in conjunction with fast bandwidth reservation (FBR). Because single-path (SP) routing is a special case of MP routing, the proposed approach can be used to analyse both routing schemes. Burst blocking probabilities obtained by both simulation and analysis for an eight-node network with MP routing are in good agreement, suggesting that the proposed analysis can be used to obtain good approximation of burst blocking probabilities for more complex networks, where computation will be excessive with simulation. The approximate analysis is then used to obtain burst blocking probabilities for MP and SP routings using a more complex network model of 19 nodes. As expected, the blocking performance is generally better with MP routing than with SP routing. However, it is observed that the use of MP routing may cause a small number of end-to-end connections to experience more blockings than they would experience with SP routing, should too much traffic of other connections be overflowing into some of the links they used.