Griffith University Packet or datagram based routing is widely used for Internet mainly due to its robustness, ease of implementation and autonomous behavior.
Hierarchical networks are necessary to provide scalability.
Recent developments propose for ATM technology to be the basis of packet switched routing protocols. This technology provides flows to reduce the number of times a packet's destination address must be looked up in a routing table thereby increasing the performance of the overall system. Basic methods to establish and maintain these flows have emerged. We provide a definition of the problem with optimality criteria, and an algorithm that autonomously establishes a dynamic hierarchy of flows over an arbitrary network according to traffic demand. If the network is of size n, our algorithm uses only labels at each router where .