Everything is better with sprinkles: Greedy routing with bounded stretch

Sprinkles is a greedy routing protocol with very low average stretch and bounded additive stretch that is inspired by a compact routing scheme for power law graphs. By replacing the hitherto centralized computations of routing information and exact distance labels on trees with a distributed construction, we transfer the additive stretch bound into a distributed routing protocol. Sprinkles is, however, not compact due to potentially unbounded address sizes. Therefore, we introduce mechanisms that lead to reduced, practicable mean and maximum address sizes while still preserving the additive stretch bound. Sprinkles is the first distributed greedy routing protocol providing an additive stretch bound, low mean stretch, and feasible address sizes on relevant topologies. We prove that the stretch bound is maintained by our adapted construction and demonstrate by extensive simulation experiments that address sizes as well as communication overhead are well-behaved on synthetic and realistic topologies of up to 200k nodes while still providing very low mean stretch.