On Multipath Routing with Transit Hubs

Empirical studies report frequent occurrences of path failure in the Internet. In providing resilience to such failures, we propose the computation of alternate backup end-to-end path that is disjoint to the default IP path. This disjoint path is created using transit hubs that can be located at diverse points in the Internet. Transit hubs provide better utilization of network resources. Assuming an IP layer routing between any two nodes, we show that the problem of computing such a disjoint path is NP-complete. We present an exact and a heuristic solution for the problem. Using routing data obtained from PlanetLab, we evaluate the efficacy of our heuristic solution.