A simple adaptive routing scheme for ShuffleNet multihop lightwave networks

The authors describe a simple, adaptive routing scheme for datagram (connectionless) and virtual circuit (connection-oriented) transmission that relieves congestion resulting from nonuniform traffic patterns and network failures. It is a distributed algorithm that uses only local state information available at the user locations. When the network is congestion free, the routing scheme delivers packets in the minimum number of hops. However, as a channel becomes overloaded, some of the traffic is distributed over less busy channels by automatically bumping packets in nonoptimal directions. The ShuffleNet connectivity makes it possible to disperse packets away from congested portions of the network quickly. Simulations of the adaptive routing scheme for datagram transmission demonstrates that it supports nonuniform traffic patterns, reduces the mean queue sizes and variances, and requires small resequencing buffers