Chapter 15 Deflection Routing in Complex Networks

Abstract Deflection routing is a viable contention resolution scheme in buffer-less network architectures where contention is the main source of information loss. In re-cent years, various reinforcement learning-based deflection routing algorithms have been proposed. However, performance of these algorithms has not been evaluated in larger networks that resemble the autonomous system-level view of the Internet. In this Chapter, we compare performance of three reinforcement learning-based deflec-tion routing algorithms by using the National Science Foundation network topology and topologies generated using Waxman and Barabási-Albert algorithms. We exam-ine the scalability of these deflection routing algorithms by increasing the network size while keeping the network load constant. The Internet is an example of a complex network that has been extensively studied. Optical networks are envisioned to be part of the Internet infrastructure intended to carry high bandwidth backbone traffic. It is expected that optical networks will carry the majority of TCP/IP traffic in the future Internet. Optical burst switching [50