Upper and Lower Bounds for Competitive Online Routing on Delaunay Triangulations

Consider a weighted graph G where vertices are points in the plane and edges are line segments. The weight of each edge is the Euclidean distance between its two endpoints. A routing algorithm on G has a competitive ratio of c if the length of the path produced by the algorithm from any vertex s to any vertex t is at most c times the length of the shortest path from s to t in G. If the length of the path is at most c times the Euclidean distance from s to t, we say that the routing algorithm on G has a routing ratio of c. We present an online routing algorithm on the Delaunay triangulation with competitive and routing ratios of 5.90. This improves upon the best known algorithm that has competitive and routing ratio 15.48. The algorithm is a generalization of the deterministic 1-local routing algorithm by Chew on the L1-Delaunay triangulation. When a message follows the routing path produced by our algorithm, its header need only contain the coordinates of s and t. This is an improvement over the currently known competitive routing algorithms on the Delaunay triangulation, for which the header of a message must additionally contain partial sums of distances along the routing path. We also show that the routing ratio of any deterministic k-local algorithm is at least 1.70 for the Delaunay triangulation and 2.70 for the L1-Delaunay triangulation. In the case of the L1-Delaunay triangulation, this implies that even though there exists a path between two points x and y whose length is at most 2.61|[xy]| (where |[xy]| denotes the length of the line segment [xy]), it is not always possible to route a message along a path of length less than 2.70|[xy]|. From these bounds on the routing ratio, we derive lower bounds on the competitive ratio of 1.23 for Delaunay triangulations and 1.12 for L1-Delaunay triangulations. 1998 ACM Subject Classification I.3.5 Computational Geometry and Object Modeling, G.2.2 Graph Theory