SEARCHING FOR LOW LATENCY ROUTES IN CPN WITH REDUCED PACKET OVERHEAD
This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, U.K. under Grant GR/S52360/01.
Most applications consider network latency as an important metric for their operation. Latency plays a particular role in time-sensitive applications, such as, data transfers or interactive sessions. Smart packets in cognitive packet networks, can learn to find low-latency paths by explicitly expressing delay in their routing goal functions. However, to maintain the quality of paths, packets need to continuously monitor the round-trip delay that paths produce, to allow the algorithm learn any change. The acquisition of network status requires space in packets and lengthens their transmission time. This paper proposes an alternative composite goal consisting of path length and buffer occupancy of nodes that requires less storage space in packets, while offering a similar performance to a delay based goal. Measurements in a network testbed and simulation studies illustrate the problem and solution addressed in this study.
