Do Next Generation Networks Need Path Diversity?

We have currently reached a phase where big shifts in the network traffic might impose to rethink the design of current architectures, and where new technologies, being pushed into market, will act as enabler of such changes. Taking into account the current scenario and its likely evolution as well, in this paper we examine the case for multi-path routing within the metropolitan access network. Through an optimization framework, we undertake the analysis of several interesting aspects of the problem, such as (i) the user access technology, (ii) the topology of the access network and (iii) the traffic locality ratio within the access. By numerical solution of the problem we quantify the potential gain given by path-diversity: our results confirm the appeal of multi-path routing strategies both from the user and the network perspectives.