The strategy of traffic dispersion

Traffic dispersion means spreading the traffic from a source over multiple independent paths, transmitting it in parallel through the network. The strategy reduces the effects of bursts in the traffic, and may hence improve the network performance in terms of reduced queuing delay. So far, there have been several reports on traffic dispersion, but to our best knowledge, there has been no in-depth investigation of how the strategy affects different types of traffic under various conditions. This paper focuses on the basic properties of traffic dispersion by defining the strategy and investigating it from the source’s as well as from the network’s point of view. We investigate the influence of dispersion on Poisson traffic, traffic generated by two-state Markov chains and traffic generated by the chaotic FPDI-map. The results indicate a large potential of traffic dispersion to provide fast, secure and fault-tolerant transmission for highly bursty traffic sources.