Load-balanced routing and scheduling for real-time traffic in packet-switch networks

Future computer networks are expected to carry bursty real-time traffic with stringent time-delay requirements. Popular shortest-path routing protocols have the disadvantage of causing bottlenecks due to their single-path routing. We propose a real-time routing and scheduling scheme that randomly distributes the traffic load over all available paths to the destination for load balancing and transmits the packet with the most urgency ahead of the other packets at a switch in a packet-switched network with two objectives-minimizing packet loss in the network and maximizing network throughput. Our scheme consists of two components, a routing algorithm and a scheduling algorithm. The routing algorithm randomly distributes data packets over the whole network to remove bottlenecks caused by the single-path routing of shortest-path routing protocols. The end-to-end delay is bounded by the scheduler, which uses a least-laxity scheduling algorithm. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme decreases the number of packets dropped due to deadline miss and due to buffer overflow in transit in a network and increases network throughput. A desirable by-product is that the traffic load on the network tends to get evenly distributed.