Bandwidth and Congestion Aware Routing for Wide-Area Hybrid Networks

An increasing number of science projects rely on sensors to gather data from remote areas. For example, a wildfire detection project deploys video cameras to various high-risk areas to identify wildfires as quickly as possible. These projects typically depend on hybrid networks that are composed of a combination of wireless and wired links to stream data from sensors to datacenters. The management of such hybrid networks is a burdensome task as both link capacities and traffic rates of flows are dynamic and unpredictable.In this paper, we introduce a BAndwidth- and Congestion Aware Routing (BACAR) for hybrid networks using Software Defined Networks. We use active delay measurements to identify congested links and update their capacity to measure traffic rate to detect any link capacity degradation events. We test BACAR in Mininet and show that it offers a robust solution to detect band-width fluctuations that can happen in long-distance wireless links and find alternative routes for rate-sensitive flows to improve overall network utilization and enhance flow performance.