Between fully dynamic routing and robust stable routing

Abstract

Due to the success of the Internet and the diversity of communication applications, it is becoming increasingly difficult to forecast traffic patterns. To capture the traffic variations, a flexible model where traffic belongs to a polytope was introduced in [5], [6], [4]. Using this uncertainty model, it is possible to compute a robust stable routing which is valid for any traffic matrix inside the polytope. It is also theoretically possible but practically difficult to consider a fully dynamic strategy where routing depends on the current traffic matrix. We will propose a strategy that can be seen as a compromise between robust routing and dynamic routing. It consists in partitioning the uncertainty set into some subsets and considering a robust routing for each subset. A theoretical study of this problem is provided in this paper.