Balancing by PREFLEX: Congestion Aware Traffic Engineering

There has long been a need for a robust and reliable system which distributes traffic across multiple paths. In particular such a system must rarely reorder packets, must not require per-flow state, must cope with different paths having different bandwidths and must be self-tuning in a variety of network contexts. PREFLEX, proposed herein, uses estimates of loss rate to balance congestion. This paper describes a method of automatically adjusting how PREFLEX will split traffic in order to balance loss across multiple paths in a variety of network conditions. Equations are derived for the automatic tuning of the time scale and traffic split at a decision point. The algorithms described allow the load balancer to self-tune to the network conditions. The calculations are simple and do not place a large burden on a router which would implement the algorithm. The algorithm is evaluated by simulation using ns-3 and is shown to perform well in a variety of circumstances. The resulting adaptive, end-to-end traffic balancing architecture provides the necessary framework to meet the increasing demands of users while simultaneously offering edge networks more fine-grained control at far shorter timescales.