Hop-by-Hop Multipath Overlay Routing for Optimizing Network Resource Allocation in WANs
Yibing Zhao, Chenhui Wang, Haojiang Deng · Electronics · 2025
The widespread deployment and rapid expansion of data centers have intensified the traffic between data centers and users, which highlights the need to improve Wide Area Network (WAN) link utilization. Existing centralized traffic control methods based on Software-Defined Wide Area Networks(SD-WAN) often rely on source-based routing, resulting in limited path diversity and inefficient network resource allocation. To address these issues, we propose a hop-by-hop multipath routing method for overlay networks, leveraging the routing decision-making capabilities of intermediate nodes. First, we introduce a Multipath Overlay node Placement (MOP) algorithm to establish an overlay network for hop-by-hop multipath transmission. The spatial relationships among overlay nodes are considered to enhance the diversity of multi-hop multipath overlay routing. Next, we propose an Overlay Next-Hop Selection (ONHS) algorithm for intermediate overlay nodes. This algorithm adjusts transmission paths at intermediate overlay nodes by sensing the network congestion state of overlay tunnels, enhancing the efficiency of network resource utilization. The results demonstrate that, under various topologies and with different numbers of overlay nodes, MOP significantly improves both end-to-end path diversity and link utilization for hop-by-hop multipath transmission. Additionally, ONHS effectively mitigates congestion escalation during next-hop selection.