Congestion-triggered Multipath Routing based on Shortest Path Information

We present a multipath routing scheme that is designed to increase throughput and alleviate congestion in networks employing shortest path routing. The multipath routing scheme consists of an algorithm to determine a set of multiple disjoint or partially disjoint paths and a mechanism for distributing traffic over a multipath route to reduce the traffic load on a congested link. The algorithm for finding multipath routes is based on shortest path routing and does not require pre-establishment of paths or support for source routing. The mechanism for multipath traffic distribution is triggered at a node when the average load on an outgoing link exceeds a threshold. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed congestion-triggered multipath routing scheme can effectively improve network performance by exploiting routing redundancies inherent in the network topology.