Alternative Paths vs. Inaccurate Link State Information in Realistic Network Topologies
Yanxia Jia, Ioanis Nikolaidis, Paweł Gburzyński · 2002
We propose a routing scheme in which connection requests with specific bandwidth demands can be assigned to one of several alternative paths connecting the source to the destination. The primary goal of this multiple-path routing approach is to compensate for the inaccuracy of the knowledge available to routing nodes, caused by the limited frequency of link state information exchanges. We study a collection of -shortest path routing schemes and investigate their performance under a variety of traffic conditions and network topologies, including regular (torus) and realistic (power-law) topologies. We subsequently demonstrate that -shortest path routing offers a lower blocking probability in all scenarios and more balanced link utilization than other routing methods discussed in the literature. With our proposed approach, it is possible to reduce the frequency of link state exchanges, and the incurred bandwidth overhead, without compromising the overall performance of the network.