Concurrent Quality of Service Requirements: A Comparative Analysis of Routing Path Selection Methods

Today's modern network carries a wide range of traffic types which impose unique and concurrent quality of service (QoS) requirements, expressed through performance metrics such as delay and loss, on the network. Metric values are used by routers to determine the best routing path to a destination. There can be multiple paths/routes' between a source and destination and several methods are available to pick the optimum path. In this paper, different methods of routing path selection are discussed, compared, and recommendations are offered. The five methods are as follows: the traditional method; the minimum performance method; the least cost path method; the analytical hierarchy process method and the weighted metric cost value method