Performance evaluation of a situation aware multipath routing solution

The dynamics of modern communication networks, especially regarding the user's behavior, determine the necessity of an effective routing protocol that can ensure high performance. In this paper we present the implementation and performance evaluation of a new dynamic multipath routing solution, called Situation Aware Multipath (SAMP), using the OPNET Modeler. The main features of our solution are load balancing and congestion avoidance. To increase the scalability, the network is divided into multipath routing domains. We defined two types of routers: AR (Adaptive Router) and AMR (Adaptive Multipath Router), with different capabilities depending on their location inside the domain. SAMP offers network robustness and reliability by taking advantage of the path diversity. The performance of the proposed solution is evaluated and compared, in terms of throughput and network resource utilization, with three standard routing protocols: OSPF, ECMP and EIGRP. The simulation results demonstrate that the new proposed multipath routing algorithm can assure increased network resource utilization and also a high transmission quality, even in case of congestion.