A literature survey on traffic dispersion

Aggregation of resources is a means to improve performance and efficiency in statistically shared systems in general, and communication networks in particular. One approach to this is traffic dispersion, which means that the traffic from a source is spread over multiple paths and transmitted in parallel through the network. Traffic dispersion may help in utilizing network resources to their full potential, while providing quality-of-service guarantees. It is a topic gaining interest, and much work has been done in the field. The results are, however, difficult to find, since the technique appears under many different labels. This article is therefore an attempt to gather and report on the work done on traffic dispersion in communication networks. It looks at a specific instance of this general method. The processes are communication processes, and the resource is the link capacity in a packet switched network