Comparing a novel QoS routing algorithm to standard pruning techniques used in QoS routing algorithms

The problem of finding QoS paths involving several combinations of network metrics is NP-complete. This motivates the use of heuristic approaches for finding feasible QoS paths. Many constraint based routing algorithms find QoS paths by first pruning resources that do not satisfy the requirements of the traffic flow and then running a shortest path algorithm on the residual graph. This approach results in a QoS path that biases the first metric used in the search process. In addition, it can be shown that this approach may not always find the optimal path. Our research introduces a QoS routing algorithm that is based on a decision support system that is used to compute QoS paths. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by comparing it to standard pruning techniques.