Best-path vs. multi-path overlay routing

Time-varying congestion on Internet paths and failures due to software, hardware, and configuration errors often disrupt packet delivery on the Internet. Many aproaches to avoiding these problems use multiple paths between two network locations. These approaches rely on a path-independence assumption in order to work well; i.e., they work best when the problems on different paths between two locations are uncorrelated in time. This paper examines the extent to which this assumption holds on the Internet by analyzing 14 days of data collected from 30 nodes in the RON testbed. We examine two problems that manifest themselves—congestion-triggered loss and path failures—and find that the chances of losing two packets between the same hosts is nearly as high when those packets are sent through an intermediate node (60%) as when they are sent back-to-back on the same path (70%). In so doing, we also compare two different ways of taking advantage of path redundancy proposed in the lite...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: IMC
• Authors: David G. Andersen, Alex C. Snoeren, Hari Balakrishnan
• Keywords: Disrupt Packet Delivery, IMC 2003, Internet Paths, Multiple Paths