A Partial-Protection Approach Using Multipath Provisioning

We study the problem of reliably provisioning traffic using multipath routing in a mesh network. Traditional approaches handled reliability requirements using full-protection schemes. Although full-protection approaches offer high assurance, this assurance can be costly. We take a less expensive approach to maintain reliability by offering partial-protection. Specifically, our approach guarantees part of the requested bandwidth, rather than the full amount, in the event of a link failure. We first show that the amount of partial-protection that can be guaranteed is limited by the topology of the network and the bandwidth requirement of a connection request. We then propose an effective multipath algorithm that attempts to provision bandwidth requests while guaranteeing the maximum partial-protection possible. Results show that by effectively selecting paths that limit edge overuse, our algorithm achieves very low bandwidth blocking probability. Our algorithm also serves significantly more requested bandwidth than the protection approach.