Accession Number:
ADA459412
Title:
A Practical Framework for Minimum-Delay Routing in Computer Networks
Descriptive Note:
Corporate Author:
CALIFORNIA UNIV SANTA CRUZ DEPT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING
Personal Author(s):
Report Date:
1999-08-27
Pagination or Media Count:
29.0
Abstract:
The conventional approach to routing in computer networks consists of using a heuristic to compute a single shortest path from a source to a destination. Single-path routing is very responsive to topological and link-cost changes however, except under light traffic loads, the delays obtained with this type of routing are far from optimal. Furthermore, if link costs are associated with delays, single-path routing exhibits oscillatory behavior and becomes unstable as traffic loads increase. On the other hand, minimum-delay routing approaches can minimize delays only when traffic is stationary or very slowly changing. We present a near-optimal routing framework that offers delays comparable to those of optimal routing and that is as flexible and responsive as single-path routing protocols proposed to date. First, an approximation to the Gallaghers minimum-delay routing problem is derived, and then algorithms that implement the approximation scheme are presented and verified. We describe the first routing algorithm based on link-state information that provides multiple paths of unequal cost to each destination that are loop-free at every instant. We show through simulations that the delays obtained in our framework for minimum-delay routing are comparable to those obtained using Gallagers algorithm for minimum-delay routing. Also, we show that our framework renders far smaller delays and makes better use of resources than traditional single-path routing.
Descriptors:
Subject Categories:
- Computer Systems