A Multipath Routing Mechanism by Packet Replication and Elimination for Reliable Communications

The current Internet adopts best-effort forwarding mode, making it difficult to provide Quality of Service (QoS) and reliability assurance. Inspired by
$1+1$
protection, we propose a reliable multipath routing mechanism through packet replication and elimination. This mechanism replicates packets at the sender, forwards them through multiple disjoint paths, and eliminates duplicate packets at the receiver, thereby ensuring timely and reliable transmission of packets. Specifically, we use P4 language to implement packet replication and elimination functions on the programmable data plane, and adopt SDN controller to calculate multiple reliable paths for establishing flexible multicast or anycast on any node, so as to prevent critical services from network failure or congestion. The experimental results show that compared to single-path and multi-path routing mechanisms, our proposed reliable routing mechanism only increases processing latency by 14% and 5% under no network load, but reduces the average packet latency by 85% and 71% respectively under high network load, and also has more stable throughput and lower delay jitter, which is suitable for network services that require high reliability, delay, and jitter.