Polylog-Competitive Deterministic Local Routing and Scheduling

This paper addresses point-to-point packet routing in undirected networks, which is the most important communication primitive in most networks. The main result proves the existence of routing tables that guarantee a polylog-competitive completion-time deterministically:

In any undirected network it is possible to give each node simple stateless deterministic local forwarding rules, such that, any adversarially chosen set of packets are delivered as fast as possible, up to polylog factors. All previous routing strategies crucially required randomization for both route selection and packet scheduling.