Jittering performance of random deflection routing in packet networks (Q391462)

The paper investigates the deployment of a deflection routing to networks with video, audio or TCP traffic, i.e., traffic flows that are time critical and sensitive to jitter. With deflection routing, packets can switch paths immediately to avoid congested links, reducing the chances of late arrival. However, packets traveling along different paths may introduce higher variation in the traveling delay, hence affecting the throughput. The authors consider the simplest design of deflection routing, called random deflection, and concentrate their analysis on small time scale (seconds or less) fluctuations that can affect the quality of traffic reception. The random deflection routing protocol consists of a least-hops routing protocol and a random deflection module. Normally, packets are forwarded from their sources to destinations along least-hop paths. It is assumed that each link is equipped with a first-in-first-out queue to store packets if they cannot be served by the link immediately. When a packet arrives at a link but the corresponding queue is full, the packet, which would otherwise be dropped, is passed to the random deflection module. Given a packet, the random deflection module forwards the packet to an alternative link chosen uniformly at random. The alternative link cannot be the incoming link and its queue cannot be full. In case of lack of alternative links, the packet is dropped. To avoid packets being deflected indefinitely without reaching their destination, every packet carries a deflection counter. The random deflection module increments the deflection counter when a packet is deflected. If the deflection counter is too large, the random deflection module drops the packet. In the paper the delay and jitter performance is evaluated by simulating a random deflection module with the use of Network Simulator 3 (ns-3). The proposed analysis and simulation experiments show that when the network utilization is not high, deflection routing can improve throughput and reduce jitter.