Multipath QoS routing with bandwidth guarantee

Recently, QoS routing has been studied intensively. In QoS routing, an essential issue is routing granularity. Most of the research adopts per-flow granularity in the forwarding table. Some research advocates per-source-destination pair granularity in the forwarding table with route pinning. The flow based approach has finer granularity, thus is more efficient in traffic engineering and resource utilization. However, the computation overhead and storage overhead are also higher. On the other hand, source-destination based granularity is more efficient on packet processing and forwarding, but has higher blocking probability. We propose the concept of forwarding with routing marks. With a limited number of routing marks, the proposed routing algorithm reduces the forwarding complexity and storage overhead significantly while yielding very competitive performance in terms of fractional reward loss.