Load Balancing in IP Networks Using Generalized Destination-Based Multipath Routing

Abstract

Intradomain traffic engineering (TE) has become an indispensable tool for Internet service providers (ISPs) to optimize network performance and utilize network resources efficiently. Various explicit routing TE methods were recently proposed and have been able to achieve high network performance. However, explicit routing has high complexity and requires large ternary content addressable memories (TCAMs) in the routers. Moreover, it is costly to deploy explicit routing in IP networks. In this paper, we present an approach, called generalized destination-based multipath routing (GDMR), to achieve the same high performance as explicit routing. The main contribution of this paper is that we prove that an arbitrary explicit routing can be converted to a loop-free destination-based routing without any performance penalty for a given traffic matrix. We present a systematic approach including a heuristic algorithm to realize GDMR. Extensive evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of GDMR.