Load Profiling Based Routing for Guaranteed Bandwidth Flows

To support the stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of real-time (e.g. audio/video) applications in integrated services networks, several routing algorithms that allow for the reservation of the needed bandwidth over a Virtual Circuit (VC), established on one of several candidate routes, have been proposed. Traditionally, such routing is done using the least-loaded concept, and thus results in balancing the load across the set of candidate routes. In this paper, we propose the use of load profiling as an attractive alternative to load balancing for routing guaranteed bandwidth VCs (flows). Load profiling techniques allow the distribution of “available” bandwidth across a set of candidate routes to match the characteristics of incoming VC QoS requests. We thoroughly characterize the performance of VC routing using load profiling and contrast it to routing using load balancing and load packing. We do so both analytically and via extensive simulations of multi-class traffic routing in Virtual Path (VP) based networks. Our findings show that for routing guaranteed bandwidth flows in VP networks, load profiling is desirable as it reduces VP bandwidth fragmentation, which increases the likelihood of accepting new VC requests. This fragmentation could be particularly harmful when the granularity of VC requests is large. Typically, this occurs when a common VC is established to carry the aggregate traffic flow of many high-bandwidth real-time sources. For VP-based networks, our simulation results show that our load-profiling VC routing scheme performs better or as well as the traditional load-balancing VC routing in terms of revenue under both skewed and uniform workloads. Furthermore, load-profiling routing improves routing fairness by proactively increasing the chances of admitting high-bandwidth flows.