Dynamic update of minimum cost paths in computer networks

The problem of dynamically update minimum cost paths in a distributed network of computers while link update operations occur to the network is considered crucial in today's practical applications. A number of solutions have been proposed in the literature for this problem. In this paper, we perform an extensive experimental study in the OMNeT++ simulation environment by implementing three different algorithms for the above described problem: the Bellman-Ford method; DUAL (a part of CISCO's widely used EIGRP protocol), which is perhaps the most used algorithm; and ConFu, a recently proposed algorithm. We perform several tests both on real-world and random networks and randomly generated update sequences. These experiments show that in most cases ConFu outperforms Bellman-Ford and DUAL in terms of either number of messages sent or space occupancy per node.