A MDP Approach to Fault-Tolerant Routing

This paper defines a theoretical framework based on Markov Decision Processes (MDP) to deal with fault-tolerant routing algorithms in heterogeneous home networks, which are realized through the integration of different wired and wireless telecommunication technologies. Such networks are characterized by fast dynamics of link availability, mainly due to the wide use of wireless technologies. The novelty of this paper is the MDP approach to the fault-tolerant routing problem, which is addressed by introducing a re-routing policy: when a path becomes unavailable, the flows transmitted over that path are re-routed on another available path; the new path is selected taking into consideration the probability that also the new path can become unavailable in the future, in order to minimize re-routing occurrences. Numerical simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.