Factors affecting congestion-aware routing in complex networks

Abstract An important issue in complex networks is to find efficient strategies for information delivery between a given sending node and its destination host. Whereas there is no doubt that the use of the congestion provides significant advantages for routing, it has been observed that there are some factors that greatly influence the behavior of the routing protocols that use it. In this paper we study the effect of two factors that greatly influence the behavior of congestion-aware routing protocols: updating all the paths at the same time and using information from a subset of the nodes to compute the paths. On one hand, we give explanations to these behaviors and, on the other hand, we quantitatively evaluate the effect of these factors on the performance of the routing protocols.