Integrated routing algorithms for anycast messages

We study integrated routing algorithms for anycast messages in packet switching networks. Integrated approach makes use of single path routing and multi-path routing. The former is simple and easy to implement and the later splits traffic into several different paths and may potentially reduce congestion, improving the delay and throughput performance. However, a multi-path routing router requires additional storage in order to maintain muti-path information. In the case that the memory size of a router is limited, using multi-path routing may result in longer delay at the router due to the time taken to (re)establish entries in a routing table. To take advantages of both the approaches and to overcome their shortcomings, we adaptively select a sub-set of routers in the network to carry out multi-path routing. The rest of routers do single path routing. We demonstrate that our integrated routing algorithms perform substantially better than the systems where either single path routing approach or multi-path approach is used alone.