Computing Traversal Times on Dynamic Markovian Paths

In source routing, a complete path is chosen for a packet to travel from source to destination. While computing the time to traverse such a path may be straightforward in a fixed, static graph, doing so becomes much more challenging in dynamic graphs, in which the state of an edge in one time slot (i.e., its presence or absence) is random, and may depend on its state in the previous time step. The traversal time is due to both time spent waiting for edges to appear and time spent crossing them once they become available. We compute the expected traversal time (ETT) for a dynamic path in a number of special cases of stochastic edge dynamics models, and for three edge failure models, culminating in a surprisingly challenging yet realistic setting in which the initial configuration of edge states for the entire path is known. We show that the ETT for this “initial configuration” setting can be computed in quadratic time, by an algorithm based on probability generating functions. We also give several linear-time upper and lower bounds on the ETT. Acknowledgements. Research was sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory and was accomplished under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-09-2-0053. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Army Research Laboratory or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation here on. ∗INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France †University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA ‡University of California and Los Angeles, CA §Raytheon BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA ¶Brooklyn College, NY ‖City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, NY 1 ar X iv :1 30 3. 36 60 v1 [ cs .N I] 1 5 M ar 2 01 3