6.5 Flow-based Routing

The flow-based approach does not scale to large implementations, such as the public Internet. Flow-based routing considers the flow (the amount of traffic) in the network before choosing a link for the packet. It is possible to compute the mean packet delay on a link from queuing theory if the capacity and average flow are known. The routing problem now is to find the routing algorithm that produces the minimum average delay for the subnet (Patrick J. Conlan 2009).