Computer Networks and Their Protocols
Computer Networks and Their Protocols
Communication nets; stochastic message flow and delay
Communication nets; stochastic message flow and delay
Optimal Routing in a Packet-Switched Computer Network
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Computer communication network design: experience with theory and practice
AFIPS '72 (Spring) Proceedings of the May 16-18, 1972, spring joint computer conference
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
A probabilistic method is proposed for message routing in packet-switched computer networks with distributed control. The routing table associated with each node consists of path entries, instead of branch entries as found in most routing schemes. Packets are assigned with different paths on a probabilistic basis. The path selection is entirely processed at the source node. The routing table is updated dynamically with change of packet-generating rates at all nodes. We introduce a new quantitative measure, path capacity, to model each path as an M/M/1 queue. With the path capacities, routing tables are updated frequently to achieve balanced minimum delays among all paths. The update overhead is a constant, independent of the size of the network. Both analytical and simulation results are presented and compared with the new ARPANET routing method under various traffic conditions. This probabilistic, path-directed routing algorithm performs significantly better than the new ARPANET routing method under moderate and heavy traffic conditions. Under very light traffic conditions, the two methods have almost equal performance. This method can be applied to improve packet routing in any computer communications networks with distributed control.