Flow-Based Routing Architecture for Valiant Load-Balanced Networks

A novel routing architecture that balances incoming Internet flows over the Valiant Load-Balanced (VLB) networks is proposed. The architecture is based on the adaptive highest random weight (Adaptive HRW) algorithm proposed to design load balanced Internet routers. To reduce flow remapping, the architecture extends the adaptive HRW algorithm with a minimal flow remapping selection scheme that identifies the traffic causing imbalance in the network and needs to be rerouted, where rerouting is implemented by adapting the weight vectors associated with the traffic. Compared to the adaptive HRW method, the selection scheme further reduces flow remapping and the effect of packets reordering. The architecture is stateless and can compute routes quickly based on the packet flow identifier. This is important when deploying the VLB network as a backbone network where the number of flows is large and storing flow state information in lookup tables could limit the network performance.