Effective delay-controlled load distribution over multipath networks

Owing to the heterogeneity and high degree of connectivity of various networks, there likely exist multiple available paths between a source and a destination. An effective model of delay-controlled load distribution becomes essential to efficiently utilize such parallel paths for multimedia data transmission and real-time applications, which are commonly known to be sensitive to packet delay, packet delay variation, and packet reordering. Recent research on load distribution has focused on load balancing efficiency, bandwidth utilization, and packet order preservation; however, a majority of the solutions do not address delay-related issues. This paper proposes a new load distribution model aiming to minimize the difference among end-to-end delays, thereby reducing packet delay variation and risk of packet reordering without additional network overhead. In general, the lower the risk of packet reordering, the smaller the delay induced by the packet reordering recovery process, i.e., extra delay induced by the packet reordering recovery process is expected to decrease. Therefore, our model can reduce not only the end-to-end delay but also the packet reordering recovery time. Finally, our proposed model is shown to outperform other existing models, via analysis and simulations.