Multipath at the transport layer: An end-to-end resilience mechanism
Justin P. Rohrer, Ramya Naidu, James P. G. Sterbenz · 2009
As society's dependence on network technology increases, the need for resilience and survivability in these services becomes increasingly apparent. Since the user experience is ultimately determined by the dependability of the end-to-end service, we address this issue at the transport layer. In this paper we introduce a resilient multipath selection algorithm, which obtains multiple end-to-end paths in the WAN context through cross-layer interaction with lower layers of the network. This cross-layer interface is provided by a thin internetwork protocol (PoMo) that supports heterogeneity at trust and policy boundaries. The result is a more resilient end-to-end service provided to applications by taking advantage of redundancy in the underlying physical network. We evaluate the efficiency tradeoffs of the multipath approach on both a synthetic topology and a tier 1 ISP's backbone network topology.