Symmetrical Routes and Reverse Path Congestion Control
Rajib Ghosh · Open Scholarship Institutional Repository (Washington University in St. Louis) · 1997
We describe new mechanisms to deal with asymmetries that arise in routing protocols. We show how to avoid route asymmetries (due to non-unique shortest paths) by adding random integer link costs. We show in detail how RIP can be modified to avoid route asymmetry with high probability, without affecting either its efficiency or performance metrics such as convergence time. Symmetrical intra-domain routing also makes possible a new form of congestion control that we call Reverse Path Congestion Control (RPCC). We show, using simulations, that RPCC can augment existing TCP congestion control mechanisms to improve start up behavior and to avoid losses at the boundary between domains and the backbone. Keywords: Internet, Autonomous System, Route Asymmetry, Congestion Control, TCP, Bellman-Ford Algorithm, Distance-Vector, Link-State, RIP. This work was supported by National Science Foundation under grant NCR-9628145 and the ONR Young Investigator Award. Symmetrical Routes and Reverse Path...