Load Balancing in IP/MPLS Networks: A Survey

The present era has witnessed tremendous growth of the Internet and various applications that are supported by it. There is an enormous pressure on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to make available adequate services for the traffics like VoIP and Video on demand. Since the resources like computing power, bandwidth etc. are limited, the traffic needs to be engineered to properly exploit them. Due to these limitations, terms like Traffic Engineering, Quality of Service (QoS) came into existence. Traffic Engineering broadly includes techniques like multipath routing & traffic splitting to balance the load among different paths. In this document, we survey various techniques proposed for load balancing that are available on the Internet. We here try not to be exhaustive but analyze the important techniques in the literature. Present survey would help to give a new direction to the research in this realm.