An Efficient Multipath Routing for Distributed Computing Systems with Data Replication

In distributed computing environments, executing a program often requires the access of remote data ®les. An ecient data routing scheme is thus important for timecritical applications. To ensure a prior desired communication quality, we present a connection-oriented routing scheme, the multipath routing, which allows multiple routes to be established between the source and the destination. Based on the multipath routing scheme, the problem of ®nding a collection of routing paths for an application to minimize its data transmission time is addressed. Such a problem becomes a complex combinatorial one when the application accesses multiple replicated data sources. Since ®nding an optimal solution is computationally infeasible in practice, we thus propose a heuristic method to get a sub-optimal solution. Ó 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.