Minimizing congestion in General Networks using oblivious on-line routing algorithms

A priciple task in parallel and distributed systems, such as networks of workstation or the Internet, is to reduce the communication load in the interconnection network, for the bandwidth of the connection network is usually the major bottleneck for the performance of distributed applications. This is due to the fact that it is often more expensive or more difficult to increase the bandwidth of the interconnection network than to increase the processor speed and memory capacity at individual nodes. Therefore, a principle task for these systems is to design distributed applications in such a way that they cause as little communication overhead as possible. However, it may not be sufficient to simply reduce the total communication load i.e. the total traffic in the network, as this can result in bottlenecks. In addition, the load has to be distributed among all network resources. This correspongs to minimizing the congestion i.e. the maximum amount of data transmitted by the link taken over all network links divided by the respective bandwidth.