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TCP-Load Balancing: The Aequitas Equilibrium

We consider the problem of traffic allocation in multipath IP networks. We postulate that the desired equilibrium distribution of network bandwidth is one where every flow acquires a TCP-fair share along each of the routes connecting its ingress and egress. This characterization calls for connection striping at the ingress to balance the load among the available routes. Still, the desired equilibrium is not reachable when flows are allowed to compete freely for bandwidth, in which case, striping is known to reduce the throughput of TCP below the fair share on the least-congested path. Using the fairness properties of TCP congestion control, we prove that under connectionload balancing and ingress–egress traffic isolation, multipath networks tend to reach the desired equilibrium at steady-state—despite the interaction among flows within traffic aggregates. The practical value of this result stems from the accuracy with which ingress–egress bandwidth allocations can be approximated using token buckets as rate limiters at the ingress routers and the availability of an efficient method for the accurate estimation of the TCP-fair shares.