Near-optimal hot-potato routing on trees

Abstract. In hot-potato (deflection) routing, nodes in the network have no buffers for packets in transit, so that some conflicting packets must be deflected away from their destinations. We study one-to-many batch routing problems on arbitrary tree topologies with n nodes. We present two hot-potato routing algorithms, one deterministic and one randomized, whose routing times are asymptotically near-optimal (within polylogarithmic factors). Both algorithms are local, hence distributed, and greedy; so, routing decisions are made locally, and packets are advanced towards their destinations whenever possible.

Near-Optimal Hot-Potato Routing on Trees

In hot-potato (deflection) routing, nodes in the network have no bu#ers for packets in transit, so that some conflicting packets must be deflected away from their destinations. In this work, we study one-tomany batch routing problems on arbitrary tree topologies with n nodes. The routing time of a routing algorithm is the time for the last packet to reach its destination. Denote by rt the optimal routing time for a given routing problem