Multipath routing by network decomposition and traffic balancing

In this work we face the routing task defined as an optimal control problem, with control variables representing the percentages of each flow routed along the available paths(multipath routing), and a cost function which accounts for balanced traffic flow across the network resources. A further issue considered in this paper is the possibility/opportunity of splitting the given network in sub-networks, each one controlled by a separate subset of variables. This of course designs a decomposition of the original control problem in a set of easier-to-be-dealt-with lower dimensional problems, leading to separate minimum unbalancing indices which sum up to a value lower than the minimum global one achievable in the no decomposition case. Some numerical simulation results validate the procedure. Copyright © 2010 The authors.