Distributed packet switching in arbitrary networks
Yuval Rabani, Éva Tardos · 1996
In a seminal paper Leighton, Maggs, and Rao consider the packet scheduling problem when a single packet has to traverse each path. They show that there exists a schedule where each packet reaches its destination in O(C + D) steps, where C is the congestion and D is the dilation. The proof relies on the Lov'asz Local Lemma, and hence is not algorithmic. In a followup paper Leighton and Maggs use an algorithmic version of the Local Lemma due to Beck to give centralized algorithms for the problem. Leighton, Maggs, and Rao also give a distributed randomized algorithm where all packets reach their destinations with high probability in O(C +D log n) steps. In this paper we develop techniques to guarantee the high probability of delivering packets without resorting to the Lov'asz Local Lemma. We improve the distributed algorithm for problems with relatively high dilation to O(C) + (log n) O(log n) D + poly(log n). We extend the techniques to handle the case of infinite streams of ...