Performance evaluations of a link state update mechanism considering traffic variation

To guarantee QoS (Quality of Service), routers should determine routing paths satisfying service requirements, based on link state information as well as network topology. Link status database (LSD) in routers should be efficiently managed to effectively reflect the current state of all links. However, there is a trade off between the exact reflection of the current link status and its update cost. For exactly reflecting the current link status, each router immediately notifies its neighbors that link state information is changed. This may degrade performance of the router due to the processing of link state update messages. On the other side, if the current link state information is not updated appropriately, a route setup request can be rejected because of the discrepancy between the current link state information and previously updated link state information in LSD. In this paper, we propose a traffic variation based link state update algorithm for adaptively controlling the generation of link state update messages and compare its performance with those of four existing algorithms by intensive simulations.