End-to-end performance guarantees for multipath flows

Anne Bouillard (1) , Laurent Jouhet (2) , Eric Thierry (2, 3)

1 DISTRIBCOM - Distributed and Iterative Algorithms for the Management of Telecommunications Systems
2 LIP - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme
3 LIAFA - Laboratoire d'informatique Algorithmique : Fondements et Applications

When routing data across a network from one source to one destination, instead of following a fixed path, one can choose to spread data on several routes in order to use all poten- tial ressources of the network. This issue has been studied for many models of networks with various objectives to opti- mize. In this paper we investigate how to route a flow across a network of servers with end-to-end performance guarantees in the framework of Network Calculus. We discuss stability issues (i.e. whether we can ensure that end-to-end delays are bounded) for arbitrary networks, and how to compute bounds on worst-case end-to-end delays and backlogs. The tightness issues are discussed on a small but challenging toy example.

Mots clés: Network Calculus; routing; flows; Ford-Fulkerson

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]; Performance et fiabilité [cs.PF]

Anne Bouillard, Laurent Jouhet, Eric Thierry. End-to-end performance guarantees for multipath flows. 2008. ⟨hal-00289106⟩