SMRS: A scalable multi-path routing scheme

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Source routing has been extensively investigated as a method of improving diversity in path selection. Due to its limited scalability, the application of source routing is hindered today. Yang and Wetherall proposed a tag-based routing architecture to provide a set of non-shortest-path routes as an alternative to explicit source routes. The idea is that each router constructs a deflection set with the 1-hop route information and utilises tags as hints to independently deflect packets to the neighbours in the deflection set. To find more diverse paths, one approach is to increase the route knowledge of every node. However, there is a tradeoff in that more route knowledge leads to more diverse loop-free and dead end-free paths, but it also causes more overhead. In this paper, our objective lies in designing a method to find more diverse paths, with minimum knowledge. In addition, the tag-based deflection approach does not consider the length of the utilised paths as a main issue, which may lead to long paths. With this in mind, we propose a scalable multi-path routing scheme (SMRS), which consists of two components. One is the extension of the Yang and Wetherall approach to 2-hop history information. The other is the next hop selection algorithms to control the average length of the utilised paths. Comprehensive simulations are conducted to compare the performance of the tag-based deflection routing and SMRS. 1. Introduction Because of the dynamic network environment, single-path routing, which usually constructs the shortest path, is subject to network faults, e.g. link or router failure, link congestion, low capacity link and high delay link, resulting in degraded delivery efficiency. Thus, finding alternative paths between the source and the destination, which is mainly implemented by multi-path routing …