Online multi-path routing in a maze

Abstract

We consider the problem of route discovery in a mesh network with faulty nodes. The number and the positions of the faulty nodes are unknown. It is known that a flooding strategy like expanding ring search can route a message linear in the minimum number of steps d while it causes a traffic (i.e. the total number of messages) of . For optimizing traffic a single-path strategy is optimal producing traffic , where p is the number of nodes that are adjacent to faulty nodes. We present a deterministic multi-path online routing algorithm that delivers a message within time steps causing traffic . This algorithm is asymptotically as fast as flooding and nearly traffic-optimal up to a polylogarithmic factor. © 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg.