Design and performance analysis of an inductive QoS routing algorithm

• Published in: Computer communications Vol. 32; no. 12; pp. 1371 - 1376
• Main Authors: Mellouk, A, Hoceini, S., Zeadally, S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2009
• Subjects: Computer Science; Networking and Internet Architecture; Shortest path routing; State dependent model; Reinforcement learning; Dynamic network; Quality of service based routing
• ISSN: 0140-3664; 1873-703X

Routing mechanism is key to the success of large-scale, distributed communication and heterogeneous networks. Consequently, computing constrained shortest paths is fundamental to some important network functions such as QoS routing and traffic engineering. The problem of QoS routing with multiple additive constraints is known to be NP-complete but researchers have been designing heuristics and approximation algorithms for multi-constrained paths algorithms to propose pseudo-polynomial time algorithms. This paper introduces a polynomial time approximation quality of service (QoS) routing algorithm and constructs dynamic state-dependent routing policies. The proposed algorithm uses an inductive approach based on trial/error paradigm combined with swarm adaptive approaches to optimize lexicographically various QoS criteria. The originality of our approach is based on the fact that our system is capable to take into account the dynamics of the network where no model of the network dynamics is assumed initially. Our approach samples, estimates, and builds the model of pertinent aspects of the environment which is very important in heterogeneous networks. The algorithm uses a model that combines both a stochastic planned pre-navigation for the exploration phase and a deterministic approach for the backward phase. Multiple paths are searched in parallel to find the K best qualified ones. To improve the overall network performance, a load adaptive balancing policy is defined and depends on a dynamic traffic path probability distribution function. We conducted a performance analysis of the proposed QoS routing algorithm using OPNET based on a platform simulated network. The obtained results demonstrate substantial performance improvements as well as the benefits of learning approaches over networks with dynamically changing traffic.