Adaptive Probabilistic Flooding for Multipath Routing

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive probabilistic flooding algorithm for efficient multipath routing in ISP networks, balancing control message overhead and path quality through a novel, distributed, and state-efficient approach.

Contribution

It presents a new distributed source routing algorithm with adaptive probabilistic flooding that discovers multiple paths while minimizing control message exchange.

Findings

Significantly reduces control message overhead.

Maintains near-optimal path quality.

Validated through extensive simulations on realistic topologies.

Abstract

In this work, we develop a distributed source routing algorithm for topology discovery suitable for ISP transport networks, that is however inspired by opportunistic algorithms used in ad hoc wireless networks. We propose a plug-and-play control plane, able to find multiple paths toward the same destination, and introduce a novel algorithm, called adaptive probabilistic flooding, to achieve this goal. By keeping a small amount of state in routers taking part in the discovery process, our technique significantly limits the amount of control messages exchanged with flooding -- and, at the same time, it only minimally affects the quality of the discovered multiple path with respect to the optimal solution. Simple analytical bounds, confirmed by results gathered with extensive simulation on four realistic topologies, show our approach to be of high practical interest.