Robust routing for minimum worst-case expected delay in unreliable networks

• Published in: IEEE Infocom '93: The Conference on Computer Communications : Proceedings : Twelfth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications pp. 338 - 346 vol.1
• Main Authors: Ogier, R.G., Rutenburg, V.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE Comput. Soc. Press 1993
• Subjects: Delay effects; Forward contracts; History; IEL; Intelligent networks; Network topology; Probability distribution; Robustness; Routing; Switches
• ISBN: 9780818635809; 0818635800
• DOI: 10.1109/INFCOM.1993.253343

The authors consider the problem of finding a routing strategy that minimizes the worst-case expected delay from every source to a single destination in an unreliable network, given a constraint on the number of outgoing links at each node that can be inoperational at any point in time. Subject to this constraint, links can fail and recover arbitrarily often. A node having a packet to forward must choose a single link on which to transmit the packet, but does not know in advance which links will be inoperational during the transmission. If a transmission fails, the packet is retransmitted (not necessarily on the same link) after some fixed amount of time. It is shown that the optimal routing strategy is a stationary randomized strategy in which each node selects the forwarding link according to a fixed probability distribution. An efficient algorithm that computes an epsilon -optimal solution in O( mod E mod log( mod V mod / epsilon )) time, for any positive number epsilon , is presented.< >