Efficient routing strategies in scale-free networks with limited bandwidth

We study the traffic dynamics in complex networks where each link is assigned a limited and identical bandwidth. Although the first-in-first-out (FIFO) queuing rule is widely applied in the routing protocol of information packets, here we argue that if we drop this rule, the overall throughput of the network can be remarkably enhanced. We propose some efficient routing strategies that do not strictly obey the FIFO rule. Compared to the routine shortest-path strategy, throughput for both Barabási-Albert (BA) networks and the Internet can be improved by a factor of more than five. We calculate the theoretical limitation of the throughput. In BA networks, our proposed strategy can achieve 88% of the theoretical optimum, yet for the Internet, it is about 12%, implying that we still have a huge space to further improve the routing strategy for the Internet. Finally, we discuss possibly promising ways to design more efficient routing strategies for the Internet.