Improved routing strategies for data traffic in scale-free networks

Abstract

We study the information packet routing process in scale-free networks by mimicking Internettraffic delivery. We incorporate both the global shortest paths information and local degreeinformation of the network in the dynamic process, via two tunable parameters,α and β, to guide the packet routing. We measure the performance of the routing method by boththe average transit times of packets and the critical packet generation rate (above whichpacket aggregation occurs in the network). We found that the routing strategies whichintegrate ingredients of both global and local topological information of the underlyingnetworks perform much better than the traditional shortest path routing protocoltaking into account the global topological information only. Moreover, by doingcomparative studies with some related works, we found that the performance of ourproposed method shows universal efficiency characteristic against the amount oftraffic.