Resilient availability and bandwidth-aware multipath provisioning for media transfer over the Internet

Traditional routing in the Internet is best-effort. Path differentiation including multipath routing is a promising technique to be used for meeting QoS requirements of media-intensive applications. Since different paths have different characteristics in terms of latency, availability and bandwidth, they offer flexibility in QoS and congestion control. Additionally protection techniques can be used to enhance the reliability of the network. This paper studies the problem of how to optimally find paths ensuring maximal bandwidth and resiliency of media transfer over the network. In particular, we propose two algorithms to reserve network paths with minimal new resources while increasing the availability of the paths and enabling congestion control. The first algorithm is based on Integer Linear Programming which minimizes the cost of the paths and the used resources. The second one is a heuristic-based algorithm which solves the scalability limitations of the ILP approach. The algorithms ensure resiliency against any single link failure in the network. The experimental results indicate that using the proposed schemes the connections availability improve significantly and a more balanced load is achieved in the network compared to the shortest path-based approaches.