Performance Evaluation of a Unicast Routing Control Agent for Proactive Diverse Link Selection

The goals of URCA are two-fold: 1) to ensure that links are evenly loaded. URCA attempts to set link costs that ensure that most links are utilized for carrying traffic. This has the result of maximizing the effective capacity or increasing the number of users that can be supported by a given network infrastructure and 2) to ensure that the effect of soft link failures is minimized. These goals must be balanced against frequent network routing re-configuration which can be disruptive and oscillations where traffic moves back and forth between a set of links due to the reconfiguration. This paper describes the functionality of the unicast routing control agent. We discuss the challenges that must be addressed in designing an effective heuristic. We report results from a simulation study to evaluate the performance gains, such as the increase in aggregate throughput, from deploying URCA compared to the case where conventional routing is used. Our simulation experiments show that using URCA can greatly enhance throughput, and reduce delay and packet loss when deployed in a wireless tactical network