LBMP: A Logarithm-Barrier-Based Multipath Protocol for Internet Traffic Management

Traffic management is the adaptation of source rates and routing to efficiently utilize network resources. Recently, the complicated interactions between different Internet traffic management modules have been elegantly modeled by distributed primal-dual utility maximization, which sheds new light for developing effective management protocols. For single-path routing with given routes, the dual is a strictly concave network optimization problem. Unfortunately, the general form of multi-path utility optimization is not strictly concave, making its solution quite unstable. Decomposition-based techniques like TRUMP (TRaffic-management Using Multipath Protocol) alleviates the instability, but their convergence is not guaranteed, nor is their optimality.