Effective use of congestion in complex networks

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a congestion-aware routing protocol that selects the pathsaccording to the congestion of nodes in the network. The aim is twofold: on one hand, andin order to prevent the networks from collapsing, it provides a good tolerance to nodes’overloads; on the other hand, and in order to guarantee efficient communication, it alsoincentivize the routes to follow short paths. We analyze the performance of our proposedrouting strategy by means of a series of experiments carried out by using simulations. Weshow that it provides a tolerance to collapse close to the optimal value. Furthermore, theaverage length of the paths behaves optimally up to the certain value of packet generationrate ρ and it grows in a linear fashion with the increase of