Incremental routing strategy on scale-free networks

The most important function of a network is for transporting traffic. Due to the low traffic capacity of network systems under the global shortest path routing, plenty of heuristic routing strategies are emerging. In this paper, we propose a heuristic routing strategy called the incremental routing algorithm to improve the traffic capacity of complex networks. We divide the routing process into N (the network size) steps and, at each step, we heuristically calculate all the routes for one source node considering both the dynamic efficient betweenness centrality and node degree information. We do extensive simulations on scale-free networks to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed incremental routing strategy. The simulation results show that the traffic capacity has been enhanced by a substantial factor at the expense of a slight lengthening in the average path.