How Bad is Single-Path Routing

—This paper investigates the network performance loss of using only single-path routing when multiple paths are available. The performance metric is the aggregate utility achieved by the joint optimization of congestion control and routing. As computing the exact loss for a general network topology is NP-hard, we develop analytical bounds on this “cost of not splitting”. Our bound is independent of the number of sourcedestination pairs when the latter one is larger than the number of links in a network. We also propose a vertex projection method and combine it with branch-and-bound to provide progressively tighter bounds on the performance loss. Numerical examples are used to show the effectiveness of our approximation technique.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: GLOBECOM
• Authors: Meng Wang, Chee Wei Tan, Ao Tang, Steven H. Low
• Keywords: General Network Topology, GLOBECOM 2009, Network Performance Loss, Performance Loss, Telecommunications