On Routing Optimization in Networks with Embedded Computational Services

Abstract: Modern communication networks are increasingly equipped with in-network computational capabilities and services. Routing in such networks is significantly more complicated than the traditional routing. A legitimate route for a flow not only needs to have enough communication and computation resources, but also has to conform to various application-specific routing constraints. This paper presents a comprehensive study on routing optimization problems in networks with embedded computational services. We develop a set of routing optimization models and derive low-complexity heuristic routing algorithms for diverse computation scenarios. For dynamic demands, we also develop an online routing algorithm with performance guarantees. Through evaluations over emerging applications on real topologies, we demonstrate that our models can be flexibly customized to meet the diverse routing requirements of different computation applications. Our proposed heuristic algorithms significantly outperform baseline algorithms and can achieve close-to-optimal performance in various scenarios.