An Efficient Multipath Routing with Dynamic Load Balancing

Single path routing schemes using dynamic routing metric amy find out the dynamic network status and recompute paths to keep the traffic from the highly loaded regions of the network. This type of routing approach, however, may lead to a routing oscillation, and further, it cannot exploit multi-paths that may frequently exist in the real network. We propose a multipath routing scheme with dynamic load balancing, called MP-DLB, which is capable of reducing the overhead incurred by the multipath routing with dynamic load balancing approach while taking advantage of the high routing performance provided by the approach. According to the analysis of Internet packet traces which show that a high percentage of network traffic is destined for a small number of networks, MP-DLB applies the multipath routing with dynamic load balancing only to a limited subset of all the destinations in the network. For the rest of the destinations, it applies traditional single path routing scheme. This approach may reduce overall routing overheads by limiting the number of destinations to apply the more complicated routing scheme while it can keep the routing performance high by providing efficient routing for the most significant traffic in the routing performance. A series of simulations are done to analyze the performance of MP-DLB. The simulation results show that MP-DLB may effectively cope with the congestion and achieve high routing performance by distributing traffic streams that are generated from varying sources and heading toward a specific hot destination over multi-paths.