Robust Routing Made Easy: Reinforcing Networks Against Non-Benign Faults

Christoph Lenzen, Moti Medina, Mehrdad Saberi, Stefan Schmid

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

With the increasing scale of communication networks, the likelihood of failures grows as well. Since these networks form a critical backbone of our digital society, it is important that they rely on robust routing algorithms which ensure connectivity despite such failures. While most modern communication networks feature robust routing mechanisms, these mechanisms are often fairly complex to design and verify, as they need to account for the effects of failures and rerouting on communication. This paper conceptualizes the design of robust routing mechanisms, with the aim to avoid such complexity. In particular, we showcase simple and generic blackbox transformations that increase resilience of routing against independently distributed failures, which allows to simulate the routing scheme on the original network, even in the presence of non-benign node failures (henceforth called faults). This is attractive as the system specification and routing policy can simply be preserved. We present a scheme for constructing such a reinforced network, given an existing (synchronous) network and a routing scheme. We prove that this algorithm comes with small constant overheads, and only requires a minimal amount of additional node and edge resources; in fact, if the failure probability is smaller than 1/n , the algorithm can come without any overhead at all. At the same time, it allows to tolerate a large number of independent random (node) faults, asymptotically almost surely. We complement our analytical results with simulations on different real-world topologies.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)283-297
Number of pages15
JournalIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
Volume32
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Feb 2024
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Communication networks
  • algorithms
  • computer networks
  • routing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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