A load profiling approach to routing guaranteed bandwidth flows

We study a new approach to routing multi-class traffic flows with guaranteed bandwidth requirements. The approach is based on our concept of load profiling (Bestavros and Matta, 1997). We thoroughly characterize routing performance using load profiling and contrast it to routing using load balancing and load packing. We do so both analytically and via extensive simulations on virtual path (VP) based networks. Our findings confirm that load balancing is not desirable as it results in VP bandwidth fragmentation, which adversely affects the likelihood of accepting new flow requests. This fragmentation is more pronounced when the granularity of the requests is large. Our simulation results also show that our load-profiling routing scheme performs better or as well as the traditional load-balancing routing in terms of revenue under both skewed and uniform workloads. Furthermore, load-profiling routing improves routing fairness by proactively increasing the chances of admitting high-bandwidth flows.