Heavy-Tailed Workload Aware Ad Hoc Routing

Prior measurement and analysis have shown that the traffic in data networks is better described by heavy-tailed (HT) distributions. For ad hoc routing, it is important to understand the impact of the heavy-tailed nature of network traffic for routing decisions since heavy-tailed workload can lead to severe performance degradation. In this paper, we present our current work on ad hoc routing by exploiting the heavy-tailed nature of the session (flow) lifetime. In particular, long- and shortlived flows are differentiated based on the unique predictability nascent in heavy-tailed distributions, with the long-lived flows distributed across the network as disperse as possible, and the short-lived flows treated as "filler" traffic. We have implemented such ideas in various ad hoc routing protocols, and in this paper we present our results experimenting on top of dynamic source routing (DSR). Simulation results reveal that our modified protocol, called DSR-HT, significantly outperforms the state-of- the-art under heavy-tailed workload.