Multipath Routing, Congestion Control and Dynamic Load Balancing

Combining transport-layer congestion control with multi-path routing is a cross-layer approach that provides performance benefits over treating the layers separately. We phrase this as an optimisation problem, examine the case of data transfers, and show how a coordinated controller gives strictly better performance than an uncoordinated controller, which sets up parallel paths. For fixed demands, and the case of random-path selection, we show how coordinated control also achieves better load balancing than greedy least-loaded path selection. We then comment on adaptive path selection.