MORT: A Technique to Improve Routing Efficiency in Fault-Tolerant Multipath Routing

Multipath routing is thought of as a promising direction of the current routing system as it can improve the network performance in terms of reliability and through-put. However, there are some challenging problems to solve towards Internet-wide multipath routing. One of them is the dramatically increasing control message overhead caused by network dynamics. More message overhead will consume more computing resources and more storage. Meanwhile, more message overhead will lead to slower convergence process for routing protocols due to longer processing time. In this paper, we present MORT to solve the above problem. MORT is based on a technique called” information hiding”. The” information hiding” technique allows routers in network to hide some routing information such as link failures and link cost changes to other routers without introducing any serious bad effect to the routing protocols. Multipath routing protocols embedded with MORT will have fewer routing message overhead and shorter routing convergence time when facing network events such as link failures and link recoveries. In the simulations, we apply MORT to a newly presented multipath protocol to show that MORT can reduce message overhead significantly as well as shortening the routing convergence time.