Improving robustness of next-hop routing

A weakness of next-hop routing is that following a link or router failure there may be no routes between some source-destination pairs, or packets may get stuck in a routing loop as the protocol operates to establish new routes. In this article, we address these weaknesses by describing mechanisms to choose alternate next hops. Our first contribution is to model the scenario as the following tree augmentation problem. Consider a mixed graph where some edges are directed and some undirected. The directed edges form a spanning tree pointing towards the common destination node. Each directed edge represents the unique next hop in the routing protocol. Our goal is to direct the undirected edges so that the resulting graph remains acyclic and the number of nodes with outdegree two or more is maximized. These nodes represent those with alternative next hops in their routing paths. We show that tree augmentation is NP-hard in general and present a simple $$\frac{1}{2}$$ 1 2 -approximation algorithm. We also study 3 special cases. We give exact polynomial-time algorithms for when the input spanning tree consists of exactly 2 directed paths or when the input graph has bounded treewidth. For planar graphs, we present a polynomial-time approximation scheme when the input tree is a breadth-first search tree. To the best of our knowledge, tree augmentation has not been previously studied.