Heuristic Routing in Communication Networks

Several important management applications, e.g., billing, generate a relatively high volume of traffic which is not delay sensitive. Both the management and the user traffic use the same network infrastructure. However, the management traffic does not yield any immediate benefits for the users, and is thus an overhead from their point of view. In a previous work it was suggested to store such traffic inside the network in case of congestion, e.g., by using the power of active networks to look for the least expensive place one can backtrack to. In this work, we suggest instead to use active networks in order to deflect the time insensitive management traffic from congested areas. To optimize the deflection we use the recent discovery about the power law characteristics of the Internet, and show that this knowledge improves our deflection performance. We show that by gathering information about the deflections we make and learning from it, we further improve our performance.