Competitive Routing of Virtual Circuits in ATM Networks

Classical routing and admission control strategies achieve provably good performance by relying on an assumption that the virtual circuits arrival pattern can be described by some a priori known probabilistic model. Recently a new online routing framework, based on the notion of competitive analysis, was proposed. This framework is geared towards design of strategies that have provably good performance even in the case where there are no statistical assumptions on the arrival pattern and parameters of the virtual circuits. The online strategies motivated by this framework are quite different from the min-hop and reservation-based strategies. This paper surveys the online routing framework, the proposed routing and admission control strategies, and discusses some of the implementation issues. Research supported by NSF CCR-9304971, ARO DAAH04-95-1-0121, and by Terman Fellowship. E-Mail: [email protected], URL: http://theory.stanford.edu/people/plotkin/plotkin.html.