Load-sensitive Routing

Load-sensitive routing has been integrated into the Internet routing algorithms since the early days of ARPANET. However, drawbacks such as overreaction to changing network conditions and permanent oscillation effects finally caused the idea of load-adaptive routing to be dropped for some decades. In the last years we see once more a tremendous growth of interest in traffic engineering and in load-sensitive routing in general. Many studies testify that with the stability mechanisms integrated these kind of algorithms strongly outperform the traditional shortest-path IP routing. In this thesis several emerging approaches to load-sensitive routing are presented and the game-theoretic approach of “selfish” routing is explained in greater details. Its potential gains and penalties are theoretically analyzed. Subsequently simulations are conducted on a network simulator with a routing protocol of this type and several other routing protocols for comparison.