An experimental study of greedy routing algorithms

The “small world” phenomenon, i.e., the fact that the global social network is strongly connected in the sense that every two persons are inter-related through a small chain of friends, has attracted research attention and has been strongly related to the results of the social psychologist's Stanley Milgram experiments; properties of social networks and relevant problems also emerge in peer-to-peer systems and their study can shed light on important modern network design properties. In this paper, we have experimentally studied greedy routing algorithms, i.e., algorithms that route information using “long-range” connections that function as shortcuts connecting “distant” network nodes. In particular, we have implemented greedy routing algorithms, and techniques from the recent literature in networks of line and grid topology using parallelization for increasing efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, no similar attempt has been made so far.