Online Routing in Faulty Mesh Networks

Stefan Ruhrup, University of Paderborn, Germany

In this talk we consider the following online route discovery problem: Given a two-dimensional mesh network with faulty nodes. The number and the position of the faulty nodes are not known in advance and there is no restriction on the size or the shape of the faulty blocks. Now, the problem is to find a path from a given source node to a target node. With a flooding strategy like expanding ring search the time to reach the target is linear in the minimum number of steps d, but the traffic (the total number of messages) grows quadratically - regardless of the presence of faulty nodes. Single-path strategies for essentially the same problem have been developed in the field of geographic routing and online navigation. Optimal single-path strategies include a traversal of the faulty blocks and produce a traffic of O(d + p), where p is the perimeter of the faulty blocks (i.e. the number of nodes adjacent to faulty nodes). Unfortunately, the time to discover the path is also O(d + p). Both approaches, flooding and single-path route discovery, fail to optimize time and traffic at the same time. We present a multi-path online routing algorithm that finds a path in time O(d) with traffic O(d + p log^2 d). This algorithm is asymptotically as fast as flooding and nearly traffic-optimal up to a poly-logarithmic factor.