Distributed route control schemes to load balance incoming traffic in multihomed stub networks

Abstract

Load balancing traffic of a multihomed stub network among its various egress links can significantly improve performance by allowing the network to route its traffic around congested paths. In [3], several centralized route control schemes to load balance traffic were proposed. It was shown that employing these route control schemes resulted in significant improvement in round-trip times. We carry this exploration further by developing distributed algorithms to load balance traffic. We show theoretically that the expected performance of the distributed version is the same as the centralized routing scheme. We further validate the schemes using both synthetic as well as actual traffic traces.