A Greedy Technique for Finding the Most Reliable Edge-Disjoint-Path-Set in a Network

Multipath routing protocols (MRP) help improve the network quality of service (QoS), including load balancing, fault tolerance (reliability), aggregate bandwidth and delay. While multipaths communication provides better failure-tolerance, their resilience only holds if the multiple paths are selected carefully. Note that selecting an optimal path set is a NP-complete problem. Recently, several algorithms have appeared in the literature to help construct multiple node-disjoint paths or multiple edge-disjoint paths. This paper presents two algorithms, discussing the later issue. The first algorithm, called clique-based-approach (CBA), finds the edge-disjoint-path-set with the optimal reliability. The second algorithm, greedy-CBA (CBA-G), is a heuristic that reduces the computational complexity of CBA. Results show that CBA-G improves the efficiency of CBA without negatively affecting its effectiveness. We also provide an explanation as to why CBA-G is able to produce edge-disjoint-path-sets with reliabilities equal or better than a benchmark protocol, DPSP.