A decentralized discrete-time controller for dynamic routing

A decentralized controller for dynamic routing in multi-destination large-scale data communication networks is presented. A dynamic model, which can incorporate different processing delays at different nodes, is developed to describe the network dynamics. It is assumed that the rate of messages being sent out from one node to another (the control signals) is updated at discrete time instants, which is the usual case in practice. It is shown that the proposed controller guarantees stability and clears the queues of the system in the absence of external input flows. The controller also keeps the queue lengths bounded in the presence of external flow rates which do not exceed a certain maximum flow rate (obtained by solving an LP optimization problem; there is no solution to the routing problem if these rates are exceeded).