Alternate path routing algorithm for traffic engineering in the Internet

Data flowing through the internet continues to grow every year. Increase in traffic demands increase in bandwidth. But bandwidth1 does not grow as fast as the traffic. This leads to congestion in the network and performance degradation. One way to avoid this problem is to use efficient routing algorithm that efficiently maps the flow of data onto the network.; The most often used routing algorithm in the internet is the shortest path algorithm (Dijkstra's algorithm). This algorithm is simple and easy to implement. But this algorithm leads to over-utilization of part of the network, while the other part remains under-utilized. In this study, a new algorithm to route traffic efficiently is proposed. This algorithm is as simple as the Dijkstra's algorithm, but routes traffic more efficiently and reduces the discrepancy in the network utilization.; The proposed algorithm identifies the critical links in the network that are responsible for congestion and finds additional routes in a network which do not contain critical links. The traffic in the network is routed via paths that have no or least number of critical links. This avoids congestion in the critical links and increases the performance of the network. The performance of the algorithm is compared with the shortest path (Dijkstra's) algorithm. The simulation is done using myNetSim which was developed for this thesis.; 1Bandwidth of a link is defined as the maximum traffic that the link can accommodate at any given time. In other words it is the capacity of the link.