On path selection for traffic with bandwidth guarantees

Transmission of multimedia streams imposes a minimum-bandwidth requirement on the path being used to ensure end-to-end Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees. While any shortest-path algorithm can be used to select a feasible path, additional constraints that limit resource consumption and balance the network load are needed to achieve efficient resource utilization. We present a systematic evaluation of four routing algorithms that offer different tradeoffs between limiting the path hop count and balancing the network load. Our evaluation considers not only the call blocking rate but also the fairness to requests for different bandwidths, robustness to inaccurate routing information, and sensitivity to the routing information update frequency. It evaluates not only the performance of these algorithms for the sessions with bandwidth guarantees, but also their impact on the lower priority best-effort sessions. Our results show that a routing algorithm that gives preference to limiting the hop count performs better when the network load is heavy, while an algorithm that gives preference to balancing the network load performs slightly better when the network load is light. We also show that the performance of using pre-computed paths with a few discrete bandwidth requests is comparable to that of computing paths on-demand, which implies feasibility of class-based routing. We observe that the routing information update interval can be set reasonably large to reduce routing overhead without sacrificing the overall performance, although an increased number of sessions can be misrouted