Feasibility Aspects of AMP Performance Evaluation in a Fluid Simulation Environment

In order to address the problem of intra-domain IP traffic engineering efficiently, we have recently proposed Adaptive Multi-Path routing (AMP) as a dynamic algorithmic solution based on a local view of the network. For two real ISP topolo- gies we have demonstrated that our scheme significantly im- proves network performance while generating only minimal signaling overhead. However, our performance evaluations have been accomplished by packet-level simulation, which has turned out to be a rather slow method as soon as realistic network sizes and traffic scenarios are considered, and thus prevents a deeper analysis of the algorithm. Therefore, we are currently developing a simulation environment which is based on the fluid model, i.e., focusing on flow aggregates in- stead of single packet events and connections, which makes it much faster than packet-level simulation. In this paper we describe the basic concepts of fluid models and evaluate the feasibility of fluid-based simulation of AMP, particularly concentrating on computational efficiency.