The browser you are using is not supported by this website. All versions of Internet Explorer are no longer supported, either by us or Microsoft (read more here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-ie-support).

Please use a modern browser to fully experience our website, such as the newest versions of Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari etc.

Multipath Routing From a Traffic Engineering Perspective: How Beneficial is It?

På svenska

Author

  • X. Liu
  • S. Mohanraj
  • Michal Pioro
  • D. Medhi

Summary, in English

Multipath routing gives traffic demands an opportunity to use multiple paths through a network. In a single-demand situation, its benefits are easy to see. In a multi-commodity case, when potentially all node-pairs (demands) generate traffic, they compete for the same network resources. In this work, we consider multipath routing in communication networks in a multi-commodity setting from a traffic engineering perspective. Based on a result from linear programming, we show that at an optimal solution, the number of demands that can have multiple paths with nonzero flows is of the order of the number of network links for three commonly used traffic engineering objectives. We introduce a multipath measure (MPM) and show that under certain traffic conditions and topological structures, the MPM is zero or close to zero, i.e., Multipath routing provides little or limited gain compared to single-path routing. For the all-pair traffic case, multipath routing is observed to be advantageous for small networks. When the number of nodes is about 25 or higher and all node pairs have traffic, this advantage drops as the number of nodes in a network increases. For the fat-tree data center topology, the benefit of multipath routing also drops as the number of pods increases. Our findings are somewhat against a common belief (expressed by the term "load sharing") that multipath routing is significantly better in effective distribution of traffic over the network resources.

Publishing year

2014

Language

English

Pages

143-154

Publication/Series

[Host publication title missing]

Document type

Conference paper

Publisher

IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.

Topic

  • Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

Conference name

IEEE 22nd International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP)

Conference date

2014-10-21 - 2014-10-24

Conference place

Raleigh, NC, United States

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISBN: 978-1-4799-6203-7