"Selfish Routing"

Sat Feb 15 02:42:03 UTC 2003

Thus spake "Sean Finn" <seanf at routescience.com>
> Chasing the last ms of optimization tends to both focus traffic
> on the single "best" link, as well as increasing the rate of route
> change as the "best" continually changes.
>
> Considering alternate paths with roughly similar performance
> significantly changes the picture. This not only reduces the
> required rate of route change, but also tends to spread the
> load across the range of valid (near-optimal) paths, and thus
> significantly mitigates the concerns raised in the paper.

The problem is eliminating the possibility of a packet taking a "near
optimal" path from A to B, and then taking another "near optimal" path from
B back to A.

I suspect this is impossible to fix while retaining hop-by-hop routing.

S