Research: New Threshold for Network Use; Limited Path Percolation

New Threshold for Network Use
Government Computer News (01/07/08) Vol. 27, No. 1, Jackson, Joab
Traditional percolation theory holds that a network is considered functional as long as one workable path is available, but in a recent paper in Physical Review Letters researchers offered a new variant of percolation theory dubbed Limited Path Percolation that takes into account how long it would take a message to get to its destination. The longer it takes the less useful the path is, says study co-author Eduardo Lopez, a researcher at the Energy Department's Los Alamos National Laboratory. "If I'm routing something and it has to go a longer route, due to localized failures, then what are the limits of this?" Lopez says. The Limited Path Percolation variant considers all of the surviving nodes, as well as how much longer it would take to traverse them. The researchers argue that the network becomes less valuable the longer it takes, and suggest that the threshold of users is determined by how tolerant they are of delays. "The interesting point is not when the percolation threshold is reached, but rather when the network stops becoming efficient," says study co-author Roni Parshani, a graduate student at Israel's Bar-Ilan University.
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