Combined use of prioritized AIMD and flow-based traffic splitting for robust TCP load balancing

In this thesis, we propose a multi-path TCP load balancing traffic engineering methodology in IP networks. In this architecture, TCP traffic is split at the flow level between the primary and secondary paths in order to prevent the adverse effect of packet reordering on TCP performance occuring in packet-based load balancing schemes. Traffic splitting is done by using a random early rerouting algorithm that controls the queuing delay difference between the two alternative paths. We apply strict priority queuing in order to prevent the knock-on effect that arises when primary and secondary path queues have equal priority. Probe packets are used for getting congestion information from the output queues of links along the paths and AIMD (Additive Increase/Multiplicative Decrease) based rate control using this congestion information is applied to the traffic routed over these paths. We compare two queuing architectures, namely first-in-first-out (FIFO) and strict priority. We show through simulations that strict priority queuing has higher performance, it is relatively more robust than FIFO queuing and it eliminates the knock-on effect. We show that avoiding packet reordering by flow level splitting significantly improves the performance of long flows. The capabilities of ns-2 simulator is improved bu using optimizations in order to apply the simulator to relatively large networks. We show that incorporating a-priori knowledge of the traffic demand matrix into the proposed architecture can further improve its performance in terms of load balancing and byte rejection ratio.