Optimal utilization of equivalent paths in computer networks with static routing

Focuses on the utilization of alternative communication paths in local and system area networks with static routing. A lot of research work has been devoted to employing such paths for fault tolerance, but the issue of utilizing them for performance enhancement has been largely neglected, especially for static routing networks. This work formally proves that the throughput of multiple paths is maximal if the traffic is uniformly distributed over them. Based on this, a procedure for destination partitioning in static routing networks is introduced. It is applicable to arbitrary multi-path topologies and traffic patterns that lend themselves to partitioning. The procedure is applied to several topologies with different degree of equivalent paths coverage and their performance is evaluated through simulations. The results demonstrate that the network performance is significantly improved when the proposed partitioning procedure is applied.