Distance-Based Routing Strategy for Traffic Transport in Spatial Networks

It is well known that routing strategies based on global topological information is not a good choice for the enhancement of traffic throughput in large-scale networks due to the heavy communication cost. On the contrary, acquiring spatial information, such as spatial distances among nodes, is more feasible. In this paper, we propose a novel distance-based routing strategy in spatial scale-free networks, called LDistance strategy. The probability of establishing links among nodes obeys the power-law in the spatial network under study. Compared with the LDegree strategy (Wang et al., 2006) and the mixed strategy (a strategy combining both greedy routing strategy and random routing strategy), results show that our proposed LDistance strategy can further enhance traffic capacity. Besides, the LDistance strategy can also achieve a much shorter delivering time than the LDegree strategy. Analyses reveal that the superiority of our strategy is mainly due to the interdependent relationship between topological and spatial characteristics in spatial scale-free networks. Furthermore, along transporting path in the LDistance strategy, the spatial distance to destination decays more rapidly, and the degrees of routers are higher than those in the LDegree strategy.