Adaptive Load Balancing Based on IP Fast Reroute to Avoid Congestion Hot-Spots

Several load balancing techniques for IP routing scheme have appeared in the literature. However, they require optimization process to compute optimal paths to meet traffic demand so that it requires a mechanism to measure traffic demand and to share them among all routes in order to follow dynamics of traffic. It naturally results in communication overhead and losing sensitivity to follow traffic dynamics. In this paper, we investigate a load balancing mechanism from another approach, i.e., based on IP fast reroute mechanisms. The main idea is simply to forward packets into detour paths supplied by IP fast reroute mechanisms only when packets meet congestion. This strategy enables us to use vacant resources adaptively as soon as they are required to avoid and dissolve the congestion. Through traffic simulation we show that IP fast reroute based load balancing mechanisms improve the capacity of networks.