Robust Load Balancing

We study the problem of balancing the traffic load in a network by route selection. The traditional approach starts from a given traffic matrix. However, as the traffic matrix is seldom available, estimated traffic matrices have to be used. Thus, the solution of the load balancing algorithm is not optimal due to errors in traffic matrix estimate. In order to overcome this, we present two variations of a robust load balancing scheme. One where no knowledge of the traffic matrix is needed, and a novel variant of the robust algorithm that does require a traffic matrix estimate but takes into consideration the estimation error involved. We compare the performance of these methods to that of traditional load balancing by a simulation study.