The goal of this project is to develop a framework for designing a multipath routing architecture whereby end hosts make adaptive, robust congestion-aware routing decisions based on information provided to them by their ISPs or by an overlay network infrastructure. Multipath routing can be used to perform congestion avoidance and to provide a natural load balancing over the different paths and a robust recovery from a link failure. The project will generate new network architectures that provide robustness to applications and networks in the face of faults and dynamic changes in traffic demands through congestion aware multipath routing. On the theoretical side, the principal investigators (PIs) will develop mathematical models to study the performance, stability, robustness, and economics of a multipath routing architecture. On the practical side, the PIs will develop new algorithms and mechanisms for providing congestion-dependent multipath routing that tolerate failures, onsets of congestion, etc. as well as new algorithms for performing traffic engineering appropriate for networks within which most traffic is multi-path.
Broader Impact: The project integrates research and education of graduate and undergraduate students through the close interaction and mentoring of students by project faculty. The PIs will seek international involvement with Universities in Brazil. The latter involvement will include the refinement of existing networked teaching tools so as to make them more robust through application of our multipath techniques.
