Multi-constraint QoS routing using a new single mixed metric

Multi-constraint quality-of-service routing becomes increasingly important as the Internet evolves to support real-time services. It is well known however, that optimum multi-constraint QoS routing is computationally complex, and for this reason various heuristics have been proposed for routing in practical situations. Among these methods, those that use a single mixed metric are the most popular. Although mixed metric routing discards potentially useful information, this is compensated for by the significantly reduced complexity. Exploiting this tradeoff is becoming increasingly important where low complexity designs are desired, such as in battery operated wireless applications. In this paper, a novel single mixed metric multi-constraint routing algorithm is introduced. The proposed technique has similar complexity compared with existing low complexity methods. Simulation results are presented which show that it can obtain better performance than comparable techniques in terms of generating feasible multi-constraint QoS routes.