Optimal transport on wireless networks

¹  Department of Physics, The University of Houston - Houston TX 77204-5005, USA
²  Assured Information Security - Rome NY 13440, USA
³  Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston - Houston TX 77204, USA

Received: 28 March 2007
Accepted: 3 July 2007

Abstract

We present a study of the application of a variant of a recently introduced heuristic algorithm for the optimization of transport routes on complex networks to the problem of finding the optimal routes of communication between nodes on wireless networks. Our algorithm iteratively balances network traffic by minimizing the maximum node betweenness on the network. The variant we consider specifically accounts for the broadcast restrictions imposed by wireless communication by using a different betweenness measure. We compare the performance of our algorithm to three other known algorithms and find that our algorithm achieves the highest transport capacity both for minimum-node-degree geometric networks, which are directed geometric networks that model wireless communication networks, and for configuration model networks that are uncorrelated scale-free networks.