Congestion Control in High Speed Networks via Alternate Path Routing

This paper presents a congestion control scheme based on alternate path routing. In the scheme, if a node encounters congestion or loses its preferred neighbor on its primary path to a destination, it sends data packets to that destination over precomputed alternate paths. The scheme ensures that data packets do not travel in loops and limits the spread of congestion to neighboring nodes. Simulations of the scheme show that alternate path routing reduces the number of dropped packets, achieves a more uniform link utilization and alleviates congestion in networks under light to moderate loading. When using alternate path routing, it is observed that the loss ratio closely follows the load ratio which is not true when using shortest path routing.