Proposals and evaluation of network routing metrics

This paper is aimed at evaluating different metrics to be used in network routing. Well-known resource conserving and load distributing metrics are evaluated as well as a new metric, which is aimed at minimizing the number of hops in the path maximizing the path delay, subject to the traffic delay constraint. To test the different metrics, an existing network topology was considered, and the generalized Dijkstra algorithm is used: the presented formulation of the algorithm is capable of finding the minimum path with respect to a defined cost (metric), subject to link constraints (such as minimum required bandwidth) and path constraints (such as maximum tolerated delay). The results show that the proposed metric is capable of enhancing the network efficiency in terms of blocking probabilities and link utilization.