A tradeoff between space and efficiency for routing tables

Abstract

Two conflicting goals play a crucial role in the design of routing schemes for communication networks. A routing scheme should use as short as possible paths for routing messages in the network, while keeping the routing information stored in the processors' local memory as succinct as possible. The efficiency of a routing scheme is measured in terms of its stretch factor - the maximum ratio between the length of a route computed by the scheme and that of a shortest path connecting the same pair of vertices.