Comparing Flow-Aware and Flow-Oblivious Adaptive Routing

This paper compares two approaches to realizing adaptive routing in the Internet: flow-oblivious multi-path routing using optimal end-to-end congestion control and flow-aware routing using fair queueing to share bandwidth on one or several paths. Multi-path congestion control provides ideal performance, assuming protocols can be designed to approximate the optimal fluid model. Flow-aware networking is more robust and less dependent on user cooperation and provides satisfactory performance provided use of long paths is limited in heavy traffic by applying "trunk reservation".