MultiRoute - a congestion-aware multipath routing protocol

We propose a novel congestion-aware routing protocol, which leverages local and remote congestion information for routing decisions. Path congestion is difficult to measure, therefore congestion aware protocols consider only local status. This protocol uses an innovative representation of congestion for router-router links. These congestion statistics are then distributed via an aggregation protocol to other routers in the network. Using this efficient and scalable approach, we are able to make routing decisions based on both local and eventual next-hop status. We compare our results with Shortest Path only routing (SP), and the Hash-Threshold variant of ECMP (HTE). We show that our algorithm can achieve up to N times the throughput of SP, where N is the number of distinct paths from source to destination. The protocol itself is media independent, but for test purposes we have employed Ethernet.