Reliable Multi-Path Routing with Bandwidth and Delay Constraints

The increased deployment of real-time video applications, including IPTV in home networks and remote monitoring in Internet of Things, requires new routing mechanism to support rapid and reliable real-time traffic transmission, especially in the bandwidth-limited and high link loss rate networks. In this paper, we study the problem of reliable multi-path routing with bandwidth and delay constraints. Considering the link loss rate, which affects the actual bandwidth, we seek a set of source-destination paths such that the valid aggregated bandwidth satisfies the constraint and meanwhile the delay of the longest path is minimized. The problem is NP-hard. We first propose a heuristic algorithm as the benchmark, and then present a polynomial time approximation algorithm to obtain a (1 + ε)-approximation solution. Simulation on well-known Internet topologies and random networks verifies the performance of our algorithms. The numerical results demonstrate the advantage of polynomial time approximation algorithm on the aspect of minimizing the delay of the selected reliable multi-paths.