WiNN: an efficient method for routing short-lived flows

Delivering real-time streaming content requires finding paths with a minimum required bandwidth. Finding such paths when requested should be fast (low startup latency) and efficient (high call acceptance rates). However, current algorithms for finding such QoS paths are ineffective when the bulk of the flows are short-lived. First, these algorithms are computationally expensive to justify invoking them on a per-request basis, and they add substantial latency to the signaling process. Moreover, they rely on frequent advertisement of residual link bandwidth, which is prohibitively expensive to perform on a short time-scale. Considering these drawbacks, a simple heuristic WiNN (Widest Next-hop Neighbor) is proposed that has low startup latency and provides good call acceptance rates. The heuristic uses neither link state updates nor complex path selection algorithms.