The advantage of balanced-allocation routing for ATM networks

We compare the long-term, steady-state performance of a variant of the standard dynamic alternative routing (DAR) technique commonly used in telephone and ATM networks, to the performance of a path-selection algorithm based on the "balanced-allocation" principle; we refer to this new algorithm as the balanced dynamic alternative routing (BDAR) algorithm. We show that, at the expense of a minor increase in routing overhead, the BDAR algorithm gives a substantial improvement in network performance, in terms both of network congestion and of bandwidth requirement.