An Eecient Multipath Forwarding Method

| We motivate and formally deene dynamic multipath routing and present the problem of packet forwarding in the multipath routing context. We demonstrate that for multipath sets that are suux matched, forwarding can be eeciently implemented with (1) a per packet overhead of a small, xed-length path identiier, and (2) router space overhead linear in K, the number of alternate paths between a source and a destination. We derive multipath forwarding schemes for suux matched path sets computed by both decentralized (link-state) and distributed (distance-vector) routing algorithms. We also prove that (1) distributed multipath routing algorithms compute suux matched multipath sets, and (2) for the criterion of ranked k-shortest paths, decentralized routing algorithms also yield suux matched multipath sets.