Protecting Intelligent Route Control Against Spurious Timeouts

Intelligent Route Controllers (IRC) are being increasingly used by multi-homed stub networks to improve performance and reliability of Internet accesses. However, little is known about the mechanisms used by IRCs to react to path failures and losses of probing packets. Since their reaction time to these events depends on the Request Timeout (RTO) used to declare that a probe is lost, this paper propose two automatic IRC' monitoring mechanisms inspired in the Jacobson's algorithm of TCP and in the Box-plot, that enable IRCs to adapt the RTO timers to network conditions, and above all, to protect IRCs against spurious RTO timeouts, while keeping short reaction times. Furthermore, simulation results show the effectiveness of these algorithms to cope with spurious RTOs.