Flow-Aware Multi-Topology Adaptive Routing

Abstract

Internet routing processes currently rely on protocols that were developed more than ten years ago. Today, we have far more computational power and memory at our disposal, and it is possible to take advantage of these resources in order to greatly increase the efficiency of routing protocols. Therefore, we propose a new approach to routing packets in IP-based networks: Flow-Aware Multi-Topology Adaptive Routing, or FAMTAR. FAMTAR combines flow-aware traffic management and an adaptive routing mechanism. A standard routing protocol is used to find the optimal path between two nodes in a network. FAMTAR makes it possible to automatically create additional paths when such demand occurs. Between two endpoints, the transmission may follow n different paths, where n is limited only by the topology of the network. In this letter, we compare FAMTAR to a classic routing protocol and demonstrate FAMTAR's superiority.

Loop Resolution Mechanism for Flow-Aware Multi-Topology Adaptive Routing

“…Such an observation is natural. We can also observe that FAMTAR provides a bit higher average hop count, however, this was already documented in [6]. The TTL-based mechanism increases the hop-count even more, yet, still the absolute number is only marginally higher than for legacy routing.…”

“…FAMTAR is a new multipath adaptive routing mechanism, introduced in [6]. Traffic engineering in FAMTAR is based on currently popular concept of flows.…”

“…All changes in the network affect only those flows which start their transmission after the event. To avoid frequent link cost changes, FAMTAR uses a hysteresis-based approach for link congestion notification as described in [6].…”

“…More information about the FAMTAR mechanism can be found in [6] and [8]. However, these publications did not analyze the problem of failures and loops in the FAMTAR networks which is explained in the following section.…”

“…When a packet of the active flow arrives, its TTL value is compared to the one stored in the FFT. If they match, everything works as originally proposed in [6] and summarized in Section II.…”