CAM04-6: Single-Path Routing of Time-varying Traffic

We consider the problem of finding a single-path intra-domain routing for time-varying traffic. We characterize the traffic variations by a finite set of traffic profiles with given non-zero fractions of occurrence. Our goal is to optimize the average performance over all of these traffic profiles. We solve the optimal multi-path version of this problem using linear programming and develop heuristic single-path solutions using randomized rounding and iterated rounding. We analyze our single-path heuristic (finding the optimal single-path routing is NP-hard), and prove that the randomized rounding algorithm has a worst case performance bound of O(log(KN)/log(log(KN))) compared to the optimal multi-path routing with a high probability, where K is the number of traffic profiles, and N the number of nodes in the network. Further, our simulations show the iterated rounding heuristics perform close to the optimal multi-path routing on a wide range of measured ISP topologies, in both the average and the worst-case. Overall, these results are extremely positive since they show that in a wide-range of practical situations, it is not necessary to deploy multi-path routing; instead, an appropriately computed single-path routing is sufficient to provide good performance.