Improving Load Balancing with Multipath Routing

Internet service providers have to provision network resources to optimize bandwidth utilization. Dynamic routing protocols take traffic variations into account to control the load distribution. Multipath routing protocols attempt to take advantage of the path diversity to bring network robustness and reliability. Indeed, with a specific traffic engineering policy, they enable load balancing across several paths. Our aim is to compute a set of loopfree paths in order to allow routers to share the load on several next hops depending on current load measurement. In this paper, we first describe our original Incoming Interface Multipath Routing technique, DT(p), then we present a scheme for load balancing, DT(p)-TE, based on link monitoring. We evaluate and compare our technique with several existing approaches by a set of simulations, using different scenarios and topologies. The simulations results suggest that the path diversity achieved with our proposition can significantly improve the network response time.