Check-in based routing strategy in scale-free networks

In many real complex artificial networks, a navigation route between a pair of source and destination is often desired to pass through at least a specified node called check-in node for doing check-in like services, such as gas fuel supplement for vehicles, GPS recording for express packages and so on. However, currently, there is a lack of routing study for complex networks equipped with check-in nodes. In this work, we first propose a general routing mechanism called check-in based routing (CBR) which can guarantee that every efficient path must include at least one check-in node. With a finite fraction of check-in nodes in the network, it can be observed that the higher the degrees of check-in nodes, the higher the network traffic capacity will be by employing the shortest path routing into CBR (namely CBR-SP). It is a great challenge on routing optimization for a network with a fraction of check-in nodes of the lowest degrees. We then employ the degree-based efficient routing (ER) into the CBR to efficiently redistribute heavy traffic from hub nodes to non-hub nodes. Under the CBR-ER, the traffic capacity can be significantly enhanced at the cost of a little network diameter and average path lengthening. The extensive simulations in scale-free networks can well confirm the effectiveness of CBR-ER.