Distributed Route Control Schemes to Load Balance Incoming Traffic in Multihomed Stub Networks

Load balancing traffic of a multi-homed stub network among its various egress links can significantly improve performance by allowing the network to route its traffic around congested paths. In the authors, several centralized route control schemes to load balance traffic were proposed. It was shown that employing these route control schemes resulted in significant improvement in round-trip times. They carry this exploration further by developing distributed algorithms to load balance traffic. They show theoretically that the expected performance of the distributed version is the same as the centralized routing scheme.