An adaptive flow-level load control scheme for multipath forwarding

Abstract

Compared with the traditional single path routing model, multipath routing increases total network utilization and end-to-end performance. When disseminating traffic into multiple paths, routers should adaptively allocate flows to each path in order to achieve load balancing among multiple paths, as most IP flows are short-lived and the flow size is not normally distributed. Moreover, routers should distribute packet streams belonging to a flow into the same next-hop not to cause end-toend performance degradation. This paper proposes an adaptive multipath load control method using a flow classifier which detects long-lived flows through the flow characteristics of the duration and the size. By dividing flows into long-lived and short-lived, congestion from the bursty transient flows may be avoided. It is shown by simulation experiments with the real packet trace that the proposed algorithm adaptively controls the load of multiple paths satisfying the given load ratio, and the minimal per-flow states at routers can be maintained by aggregating flows with the destination network prefix.