Investigation of Multipath Routing Algorithms in Software Defined Networking

Partial disjoint multipath routing has been largely deployed in networks such as wireless sensor networks, outperforming single path routing in load balance and fault tolerance, etc. However, disjoint multipath routing has not been widely deployed in networks, because the difficulty of designing an accordingly distributed algorithm. Software defined networking (SDN) is based on the abstract of the network structure, which separates the data plane and control plane, decouples the path dependence, and makes the network management greatly simplified. Due to its architecture, disjoint multipath routing is likely to be employed in SDN, and attracts considerable research interest in the community. This paper considers SDN as the research background, designs and implements disjoint multipath routing, and compares to the traditional single shortest path routing. This paper simulates the routing progress in the network, using complete graph, grid and X grid graph as network model. The experimental results show that disjoint multipath routing compares favorably to the traditional single path routing method in load balance, by comparing covariance values difference of the traffic. It also shows that the advantage of disjoint multipath routing partially comes from the load limit of a link in networks.