Competitive routing of virtual circuits in ATM networks

Classical routing and admission control strategies achieve provably good performance by relying on an assumption that the virtual circuits arrival pattern can be described by some a priori known probabilistic model. A new on-line routing framework, based on the notion of competitive analysis, was proposed. This framework is geared toward design of strategies that have provably good performance even in the case where there are no statistical assumptions on the arrival pattern and parameters of the virtual circuits. The on-line strategies motivated by this framework are quite different from the min-hop and reservation-based strategies. This paper surveys the on-line routing framework, the proposed routing and admission control strategies, and discusses some of the implementation issues