Abstract
Fixed robust routing is attracting attention as routing that achieves high robustness against changes in traffic patterns without conducting traffic measurement and performing dynamic route changes. Fixed robust routing minimizes the worst-case maximum link load by distributing traffic of every source-destination (s-d) router pair onto multiple candidate paths (multipath routing). Multipath routing, however, can result in performance degradation of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) because of frequent out-of-order packet arrivals. In this paper, we first investigate the influence of multipath routing on TCP performance under fixed robust routing with a simulation using ns-2. The simulation results clarify that TCP throughput greatly degrades with multipath routing. We next propose a candidate path selection method to improve TCP throughput while suppressing the worst-case maximum link load to less than the allowed level under fixed robust routing. The method selects a single candidate path for each of a predetermined ratio of s-d router pairs in order to avoid TCP performance degradation, and it selects multiple candidate paths for each of the other router pairs in order to suppress the worst-case maximum link load. Numerical examples show that, provided the worst-case maximum link load is less than 1.0, our proposed method achieves about six times the TCP throughput as the original fixed robust routing.