A new fully dynamic algorithm for distributed shortest paths and its experimental evaluation

In this paper we study the problem of dynamically update all-pairs shortest paths in a distributed network while edge update operations occur to the network. Most of the previous solutions for this problem suffer of two main limitations: they work under the assumption that before dealing with an edge update operation, the algorithm for each previous operation has to be terminated, that is, they are not able to update shortest paths concurrently; they concurrently update shortest paths, but their convergence can be very slow (possibly infinite) due to the well-known looping and count-to-infinity phenomena; they are not suitable to work in the realistic fully dynamic case, where an arbitrary sequence of edge change operations can occur to the network in an unpredictable way. In this paper, we make a step forward in the area of shortest paths routing, by providing a new fully dynamic solution that overcomes some of the above limitations. In fact, our algorithm is able to concurrently update shortest paths, it heuristically reduces the cases where the looping and count-to-infinity phenomena occur and it is experimentally better than the Bellman-Ford algorithm.