MDVA: a distance-vector multipath routing protocol

Routing protocols using the distributed Bellman-Ford (DBF) algorithm converge very slowly to the correct routes when link costs increase, and in the case when a set of link failures results in a network partition, DBF simply fails to converge, a problem which is commonly referred to as the count-to-infinity problem. We present the first distance-vector routing algorithm, MDVA, that uses a set of loop-free invariants to prevent the count-to-infinity problem. MDVA, in addition, computes multipaths that are loop-free at every instant. In our earlier work we shows how such loop-free multipaths can be used in traffic load-balancing and minimizing delays, which otherwise are impossible to perform in current single-path routing algorithms.