Delay-Based Issues in IP Networks

Many solutions have been proposed these last years to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) in the Internet. These include protocols to avoid congestion, mechanisms for traffic smoothing, flow classification and resource reservation scheme. Most of these solutions impose restriction on users traffic in order to offer QoS guarantee. In addition, they are based on the shortest path routing and so they do not try to improve the traffic balance in the network. We believe this is an important issue. Underloaded areas of the network may present a good alternative if they are taken into account by the routing protocol during path calculation. We present in this paper a new routing protocol based on a route discovery mechanism, which takes into account the instantaneous load of the network to determine the shortest end-to-end delay paths