Multipath Network Flows: Bounded Buffers and Jitter

In this paper we address the issue of designing multi-path routing algorithms. Multi-path routing has the potential of improving the throughput but requires buffers at the destination. Our model assumes a network with capacitated edges and a delay function associated with the network links (edges). We consider the problem of establishing a specified throughput from source to destination in the network, given bounds on the buffer size available at the destination and a bound on the maximum delay paths are allowed to have. A related problem which we consider is to establish bounds on the delay variance (which we call jitter) amongst the paths chosen for the multi-path routing scheme. We show that the problems are NP-complete and present pseudo-polynomial algorithms based on linear programming. We also propose practical heuristics and present the experimental results on an existing network topology. The results are promising.