Enhancing Multiple Routing Configurations through systematic analysis of topological characteristics

Summary Previous studies show that topological characteristics in IP networks significantly influence the performance of networking algorithms, which therefore should be systematically analyzed using diverse topologies prior to their deployments. In this paper, we present an elaborate topological dependency analysis of a multi-topology routing-based IP fast re-route technology, namely, Multiple Routing Configurations (MRC), using a large topology pool with diverse properties. Through an extensive analysis using our automated topological analysis tool, we discover a significant correlation between the performance of MRC and topological characteristics. MRC needs to construct a higher number of virtual topologies to provide full alternate path coverage if a network topology tends to have more hub nodes, whose degree is much higher than the rest of the network. Inspired by our topological analysis results, we propose a new heuristic algorithm enhancing MRC. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our heuristic significantly improves the performance of MRC confirming the effectiveness of the systematic analysis of topological characteristics. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.