Designing Networks for Low Weight, Small Routing Diameter and Low Congestion

Van Nguyen and Chip Martel, UC-Davis

 

 

We design network topologies and routing strategies which optimize several measures simultaneously: low cost, small routing diameter, bounded degree and low congestion. This set of design issues is broader than traditional network design and hence, our work is useful and relevant to a set of traditional and emerging design problems. Surprisingly, a simple idea from the research on small-world models inspires a fruitful approach and useful techniques here.

 

Starting with a simple model we consider adding long links to an n × n grid graph. Ideally, for a given budget to buy additional long links, we consider mechanisms for choosing links such that the routing diameter is small enough (poly-log of n) while the congestion ratio (between the most used link and the average one) is minimized, assuming uniform traffic between any two of the n2 nodes. We show that by adding O(1) long links to each node we achieve an almost logarithmic routing diameter and maintain a near optimal trade-off between congestion ratio and average weight (of long links): Weight × Congestion Ratio = O(n). Our results are comparable to the best similar network structures when the trade-off space we consider is reduced to those in the compared designs (with fewer trade-off factors). We also consider extensions of our results to more general settings.

 

We propose two construction schemes: 1) a static (fixed link) design and 2) a dynamic (random link) design. While the former provides our best trade-off results, the later is more scalable, better suited for dynamic and fault-tolerance issues, and can be useful for wireless ad-hoc networks.