COMPUTING SHORTEST, FASTEST, AND FOREMOST JOURNEYS IN DYNAMIC NETWORKS

Abstract

New technologies and the deployment of mobile and nomadic services are driving the emergence of complex communications networks, that have a highly dynamic behavior. This naturally engenders new route-discovery problems under changing conditions over these networks. Unfortunately, the temporal variations in the network topology are hard to be effectively captured in a classical graph model. In this paper, we use and extend a recently proposed graph theoretic model, which helps capture the evolving characteristic of such networks, in order to propose and formally analyze least cost journey (the analog of paths in usual graphs) in a class of dynamic networks, where the changes in the topology can be predicted in advance. Cost measures investigated here are hop count (shortest journeys), arrival date (foremost journeys), and time span (fastest journeys).