An Efficient Approach for Generalized Load Balancing in Multipath Packet Switched Networks

Abstract: This paper is a quantitative analysis on packet switched network with a view to generalize load balancing and determination of appropriate routing algorithm in multipath environment. Several routing algorithms have been introduced for routing of packets from source to destination. Some of them route packets accurately with increased workload and some of them drastically cut down the workload. A few of them can find out a minimum workload deviation for both UDP and TCP packets. We simulated these approaches in a well defined simulator, analyzed and evaluated their performance. After expanding our analysis with varying weights and number of paths we found that the recently proposed routing algorithm Mixed Weighted Fair Routing (MWFR) outperforms the existing routing algorithms by reducing the routing and network overhead and saving the scarce bandwidth as well as CPU consumption for packet switching networks.