Improved routing strategies for Internet traffic delivery

TL;DR

This paper evaluates various Internet routing strategies, revealing that current mechanisms are suboptimal and proposing a more efficient, yet simple, routing scheme based on real network data.

Contribution

It introduces a new scoring function to compare routing protocols and demonstrates potential improvements over existing Internet routing mechanisms.

Findings

Local network properties significantly affect packet delivery time.

Current routing mechanisms are less efficient than possible alternatives.

A more general, simple routing scheme can enhance traffic handling.

Abstract

We analyze different strategies aimed at optimizing routing policies in the Internet. We first show that for a simple deterministic algorithm the local properties of the network deeply influence the time needed for packet delivery between two arbitrarily chosen nodes. We next rely on a real Internet map at the autonomous system level and introduce a score function that allows us to examine different routing protocols and their efficiency in traffic handling and packet delivery. Our results suggest that actual mechanisms are not the most efficient and that they can be integrated in a more general, though not too complex, scheme.