Load balancing in the provisioning of hose model virtual private networks with multi-path routing

Load balancing in the provisioning of virtual private network (VPN) service in the hose model is studied. Single-path routing and tree routing for the hose model tend to aggregate bandwidth reservations on a small number of links, thus leading to congestion problems in service provider networks. If the link capacity is depleted as a result of improper routing, all future non-VPN traffic will be blocked. We propose a novel multi-objective multi-path (MOMP) routing linear program with the maximum fraction of traffic on a path (MFTP) constraint to solve the problem. The MOMP routing algorithm is able to reduce the bandwidth reservation on the most loaded link by as much as 50%, thus effectively alleviating the potential congestion problems in service provider network. The MFTP constraint provides a guarantee of the availability of multiple paths for each VPN endpoint pair. Further reduction of the bandwidth reservation can be achieved depending on the MFTP value. This is highly significant.