Routing and flow control in a WAN

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is motivated by the need for flexibility in the internet. The internet is made up of nodes, mainly routers which route packets to their intended destinations, and the physical links that are used to carry the packets from one router to another. Many studies have been carried out in the fields of data networks on how to determine where to route a packet received by a router. The routing process involved mainly consists of two entities the Routing Protocol and the Routing Algorithm used. The routing process in networks is called Network Routing and is used to organize flows through a network. A routing protocol is the implementation of a routing algorithm whilst a routing algorithm is used to find the best paths between all the routers involved in a network. The focus of this thesis is to achieve flow control through the use of a routing algorithm. Routing algorithms can be classified into global and decentralized routing algorithms. Another important consideration about routing algorithms is whether the network involved is static or dynamic. The flow control mechanism adopted in this thesis is based on distance vector routing protocols using the Bellman-Ford algorithm. Different simulations have been carried out in order to evaluate the performance of the implemented algorithm in different scenarios. The performance of the network is determined by factors such as the frequency of updates that are sent and the frequency of routes that are computed. The changes of these factors over time, the remaining buffer space of each router and the queue size have also been studied and noted down.