A new routing strategy limited by heterogeneous link bandwidth

Traffic capacity of a network is very vital to a variety of complex networks, such as communication networks and road networks, in which the bandwidth of every link is limited or finite. In this work, inspired by the deployment process of nodes and links in real networks, we assume the bandwidth of every link is composed of a constant part and a degree-related one that can be updated iteratively with the network hardware update. We propose a link bandwidth-based routing mechanism to enhance the network traffic capacity. Extensive simulations in both scale-free networks and random networks are done to confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method. Comparing results with the shortest path routing and a weighted routing, our method achieves better network traffic capacity among all used routing strategies without obvious extra cost including the network diameter, average path length and average packet traveling time. Our work studies network routing from a very new perspective and might have potential applications in real network systems such as the communication networks.