Multipath routing

Multipath routing is the routing technique of using multiple alternative paths through a network, which can yield a variety of benefits such as fault tolerance, increased bandwidth, or improved security. The multiple paths computed might be overlapped, edge-disjointed or node-disjointed with each other. Extensive research has been done on multipath routing techniques, but multipath routing is not yet widely deployed in practice.

Multipath routing in wireless networks

To improve performance or fault tolerance:

CMR (Concurrent Multipath Routing) is often taken to mean simultaneous management and utilization of multiple available paths for the transmission of streams of data emanating from an application or multiple applications. In this form, each stream is assigned a separate path, uniquely to the extent supported by the number of paths available. If there are more streams than available paths, some streams will share paths. This provides better utilization of available bandwidth by creating multiple active transmission queues. It also provides a measure of fault tolerance in that, should a path fail, only the traffic assigned to that path is affected, the other paths continuing to serve their stream flows; there is also, ideally, an alternative path immediately available upon which to continue or restart the interrupted stream.