Routing in the Manhattan Street Network

The Manhattan Street Network is a regular, two-connected network, designed for packet communications in a local or metropolitan area. It operates as a slotted system, similar to conventional loop networks. Unlike loop networks, routing decisions must be made at every node in this network. In this paper, several distributed routing rules are investigated that take advantage of the regular structure of the network. In an operational network, irregularities occur in the structure because of the addressing mechanisms, adding single nodes, and failures. A fractional addressing scheme is described that makes it possible to add new rows or columns to the network without changing the addresses of existing nodes. A technique is described for adding one node at a time to the network, while changing only two existing links. Finally, two procedures are described that allow the network to adapt to node or link failures. The effect that irregularities have on routing mechanisms designed for a regular structure is investigated.