Feasibility Aspects of AMP Performance Evaluation in a Fluid Simulation Environment

In order to address the problem of intra-domain IP traffic engineering efficiently, we have recently proposed Adaptive Multi-Path routing (AMP) as a dynamic algorithmic solution based on a local view of the network. For two real ISP topologies we have demonstrated that our scheme significantly improves network performance while generating only minimal signaling overhead. However, our performance evaluations have been accomplished by packet-level simulation, which has turned out to be a rather slow method as soon as realistic network sizes and traffic scenarios are considered, and thus prevents a deeper analysis of the algorithm. Therefore, we are currently developing a simulation environment which is based on the fluid model, i.e., focusing on flow aggregates instead of single packet events and connections, which makes it much faster than packet-level simulation. In this paper we describe the basic concepts of fluid models and evaluate the feasibility of fluid-based simulation of AMP, particularly concentrating on computational efficiency.