Aggregating path information in distance-vector protocols

Abstract

In the distance-vector routing protocols, among several paths to a certain destination, a node advertises only the best or the most representative path information to its neighbors. Unfortunately, the best path may not be well-defined in a network with two or more constraints. For example, when bandwidth and delay are considered, a path with the highest bandwidth may not have the smallest delay and this path is only the best in terms of bandwidth. Previous studies have shown that in order not to have any QoS information loss, we need to advertise the information of several paths. This is not scalable and a line segment representation [1] is developed to advertise the QoS of several paths, coping very well with the scalability problem at the expense of some information accuracy loss. The line segment representation has been studied under the ATM model where nodes are assumed to operate under a link-state routing protocol with a global but aggregated topology information. In this paper, we study how to apply the line segment representation in the distance-vector routing protocol. Our simulation results show that our protocol successfully aggregates the information of several paths in a scalable manner. QoS, distance-vector protocol, aggregation.