Service-Specific ABR Routing Algorithms

A wide variety of applications, including traditional data transfer and adaptive real-time multimedia, can potentially use the ATM available bit rate service. While these applications all share the ability to adapt their rate, they otherwise may have very different characteristics. The goal of this paper is to examine routing algorithms in the context of two different classes of best-effort applications: data-driven and real-time. We propose three new routing algorithms and compare them to algorithms from the literature using global and per-connection metrics. We demonstrate that the performance of a given routing algorithm is quite sensitive to the class of application. For real-time connections, routing algorithms that prefer shorter routes show better results. For data-driven applications, routing algorithms that try to balance allocated bandwidth and length of routes perform better. We further show that our new subgraphing algorithm consistently performs best for real-time applications on nearly all metrics.