Reward-based routing and Braess' Paradox an efficient resource usage strategy

There exists evidence showing that Internet end-to-end performance is directly affected by well-known routing inefficiencies. Braess' Paradox is an example of the inefficient use of resources as a result of inadequate policies, thus tackling it might be a necessary condition for the new routing strategies. In this paper we propose a routing strategy based on Q-Routing that provides an improved exploration/exploitation tradeoff, which resulted in a dynamic load balancing scheme. We tested it under the conditions of the Braess' Paradox, using NS-2 network simulator. It is shown that the new strategy avoids the Braess' Paradox, increasing network resource availability.