Observations on hot potato routing

In “hot potato” packet routing problems, packets need to be routed to their respective destinations on a network. At each time step, each communication link can be traversed by at most one packet. Packets must keep on moving until they reach their destinations, even if this means temporarily moving further away from their destinations. We investigate some simple design principles for hot potato routing algorithms. Perhaps our most important negative result is that for a wide class of natural algorithms, the number of deflections that a packet suffers can grow experimentally in the number of other packets in the network. On the positive side, we present some (admitedly weak) upper bounds on the worst case performance for algorithms for general networks, and for special cases such as the mesh, the torus, and the infinite line