Improved routing strategies for data traffic in scale-free networks

We study the information packet routing process in scale-free networks by mimicking Internet traffic delivery. We incorporate both the global shortest paths information and local degree information of the network in the dynamic process, via two tunable parameters, α and β, to guide the packet routing. We measure the performance of the routing method by both the average transit times of packets and the critical packet generation rate (above which packet aggregation occurs in the network). We found that the routing strategies which integrate ingredients of both global and local topological information of the underlying networks perform much better than the traditional shortest path routing protocol taking into account the global topological information only. Moreover, by doing comparative studies with some related works, we found that the performance of our proposed method shows universal efficiency characteristic against the amount of traffic.