A New Multi-Path Routing Methodology Based on Logit Type Assignment

We present a new multi-path routing methodology called MLB-routing based on multinomial logit model, which is well known as the random utility theory. The key concept of the study is to incorporate multiple paths from same origin to destination, and distribute packets followed by the multinomial logit type probability. Since MLB-routing is pure multi-path routing, it reduce the severe convergence to same links and increases the bandwidth utilization in the network. Compared to the existing multi-path routing schemes that select pre-determined alternate paths, the proposed method can dynamically distribute packets to every possible paths and thus is more efficient than them. Furthermore, it should be mentioned that this methodology could be implemented as both link-state protocol and distance-vector protocol. Therefore, it has enough affinity for present Internet mechanism. Using simulations, we have also shown that this methodology produces more efficient use of network and causes significant improvements in end-to-end delays and jitter times.