João Luís Sobrinho, professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (DEEC) and Miguel Ferreira, master student, authored the article “Routing on Multiple Optimality Criteria”, awarded with “Best Paper Award” during SIGCOMM, the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication.

The authors are “honoured by the distinction, proud of what we have achieved with the limited resources at our disposal and happy for this recognition”, but “also humble, given the complexity of the problems and the vastness of knowledge generated by the community to solve them”.

The work develops routing protocols on short paths even when the optimality criteria does not satisfy isotonicity. The selection of paths occurs in two steps. “In the first step, the network calculates a set of paths, instead of one single path, with mathematical proof that the shortest path is one of the elements of the set. In the second step, the origin identifies the destination shortest path within a set of paths calculated by the network ”, says professor João Luís Sobrinho.

“Our work was analysed by five reviewers”, recalls professor João Luís Sobrinho. At the same time, the software developed was independently tested and is available for use by the community. 250 papers were submitted to the conference, of which only 53 were accepted, which means an acceptance rate of 21%. Only two articles were awarded: this one from Técnico and another work authored by 12 researchers from Google.

The five reviewers chose the article authored by João Luís Sobrinho and Miguel Ferreira for its generality, relative simplicity and elegant solution for a problem that was unresolved for years; the mathematical rigor that contrasts with empiricism of executing routing protocols over the years; and the fact that the article, although written in a dense style, is very well-structured.