Self-organizing weights for Internet AS-graphs and surprisingly simple routing metrics

¹ Aarhus School of Engineering and Department of Mathematical Sciences, Aarhus University - Ny Munkegade 118, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark, EU
² Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and Frankfurt International Graduate School for Science, Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität - Ruth-Moufang-Straße 1, 60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, EU

^a scholz@imf.au.dk

Received: 21 December 2010
Accepted: 17 March 2011

Abstract

The transport capacity of Internet-like communication networks and hence their efficiency may be improved by a factor of 5–10 through the use of highly optimized routing metrics, as demonstrated previously. The numerical determination of such routing metrics can be computationally demanding to an extent that prohibits both investigation of and application to very large networks. In an attempt to find a numerically less expensive way of constructing a metric with a comparable performance increase, we propose a local, self-organizing iteration scheme and find two surprisingly simple and efficient metrics. The new metrics have negligible computational cost and result in an approximately 5-fold performance increase, providing distinguished competitiveness with the computationally costly counterparts. They are applicable to very large networks and easy to implement in today's Internet routing protocol on the AS-level.