Robust Routing Made Easy: Reinforcing Networks Against Non-Benign Faults

With the increasing scale of communication networks, the likelihood of failures grows as well. Since these networks form a critical backbone of our digital society, it is important that they rely on robust routing algorithms which ensure connectivity despite such failures. While most modern communication networks feature robust routing mechanisms, these mechanisms are often fairly complex to design and verify, as they need to account for the effects of failures and rerouting on communication. This paper conceptualizes the design of robust routing mechanisms, with the aim to avoid such complexity. In particular, we showcase simple and generic blackbox transformations that increase resilience of routing against independently distributed failures, which allows to simulate the routing scheme on the original network, even in the presence of non-benign node failures (henceforth called faults). This is attractive as the system specification and routing policy can simply be preserved. We present a scheme for constructing such a reinforced network, given an existing (synchronous) network and a routing scheme. We prove that this algorithm comes with small constant overheads, and only requires a minimal amount of additional node and edge resources; in fact, if the failure probability is smaller than 1/n , the algorithm can come without any overhead at all. At the same time, it allows to tolerate a large number of independent random (node) faults, asymptotically almost surely. We complement our analytical results with simulations on different real-world topologies.

Automated summary

With the increasing scale of communication networks, the importance of robust routing algorithms is highlighted. This paper presents a conceptual design of robust routing mechanisms that are simple and generic, with the goal of avoiding complexity. The paper also showcases a scheme for constructing a reinforced network that can tolerate a large number of independent random faults.