Efficient packet routing strategy in complex networks

We investigate a new efficient packet routing strategy which mitigates traffic congestion on complex networks. In order to avoid congestion, we minimize the maximum betweenness, which is a measure for concentration of routing paths passing through a node in the network. Danila et al. propose a packet routing strategy in which, instead of shortest paths, they used efficient paths, which are the paths with the minimum total summations of weights assigned to nodes in the respective paths. They use a heuristic algorithm in which the weights are updated step by step by using the information of betweenness of each node in every step and the respective total summations of weights for paths through the nodes with large degrees become comparatively large. Thus passage through such nodes, where congestion almost occurs, is likely to be avoided in their algorithm. The convergence time by their algorithm is, however, quite long. In this paper, we propose a new efficient heuristic algorithm which balances traffic on networks by achieving minimization of the maximum betweenness in the much smaller number of iteration steps for convergence than that by the algorithm of Danila et al. ► A new efficient heuristic algorithm for minimization of the maximum betweenness. ► The algorithm converges much faster than that proposed by Danila et al. ► With the algorithm, packet traffic congestion on complex networks is mitigated.