Flow Aggregation Mechanism for Flow-Aware Multi-Topology Adaptive Routing
Jerzy Domżał, Piotr Jurkiewicz, Piotr Gawłowicz, Robert Wójcik · IEEE Communications Letters · 2017
Today, the notion of treating the network traffic as flows is popular. The analyzed flow-based architectures are focused on access networks, because for the core, there is simply too many flows to efficiently deal with. Therefore, an important aspect of flow-based networking is flow aggregation. We show that it is possible and profitable to use aggregates of flows in flow-aware multi-topology adaptive routing, which is a new multipath solution for the IP networks. By aggregating flows, core routers do not need to maintain full flow tables, which makes them less expensive to build and operate. Results show that the proposed aggregation mechanism provides the same overall network performance with flow tables significantly smaller in size.