Introducing Multi-Plane Routing for next-generation all-IP wireless access networks

It becomes more and more recognized that using IP as the underlying foundation for the next-generation of wireless networks makes strong economic sense. This is evident in installation and operation, and technical aspects as it takes advantage of the ubiquitous installed IP infrastructure. Because of that, a resilient, efficient and easy implementable routing paradigm is needed. Multi-Plane Routing (MPR) is a routing technique, using the recent multi-topology approach, that leverages multiple alternative paths (from each source-destination pair) through a network. In this paper, we introduce MPR for wireless access networks and show that, with an optimal link weight assignment, it can reduce the maximum link utilization by up to 40% and end-to-end delay by up to 90%. MPR also increases the overall network performance by maximizing path diversity across the routing planes and splitting traffic using a branching factor. Finally, our experiments show that our nascent approach can achieve high performance in next-generation all-IP wireless access networks with a moderate number of routing planes.