Backpressure-based adaptive routing algorithms have been studied extensively in the literature. Although backpressure-based adaptive routing algorithms have been shown to be network-wide throughput optimal, they typically have poor delay performance under light or moderate loads because packets may be sent over unnecessarily long routes. Further, backpressure-based algorithms have required every node to compute differential backlogs for every destination queue with the corresponding destination queue at every adjacent node. This computation is expensive given the large number of possible pairwise differential backlogs and requires many exchanges of backlog information between adjacent nodes. In this paper, we propose new backpressure-based adaptive routing algorithms that only use shortest-path routes to destinations when they are sufficient to accommodate the given traffic load, but the proposed algorithms will incrementally expand routing choices as needed to accommodate increasing traffic loads. We show analytically by means of fluid analysis that the proposed algorithms retain network-wide throughput optimality, and we show empirically by means of simulations that our proposed algorithms provide substantial improvements in delay performance. Our evaluations further show that in practice, our approach dramatically reduces the number of pairwise differential backlogs that have to be computed and the amount of corresponding backlog information that has to be exchanged because routing choices are only incrementally expanded as needed.

Internet traffic continues to grow exponentially, calling for switches that can scale well in both size and speed. While load-balanced switches can achieve such scalability, they suffer from a fundamental packet reordering problem. Existing proposals either suffer from poor worst-case packet delays or require sophisticated matching mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a new family of stable load-balanced switches called "Sprinklers" that has comparable implementation cost and performance as the baseline load-balanced switch, but yet can guarantee packet ordering. The main idea is to force all packets within the same virtual output queue (VOQ) to traverse the same ``fat path'' through the switch, so that packet reordering cannot occur. At the core of Sprinklers are two key innovations: a randomized way to determine the "fat path" for each VOQ, and a way to determine its "fatness" roughly in proportion to the rate of the VOQ. These innovations enable Sprinklers to achieve near-perfect load-balancing under arbitrary admissible traffic. Proving this property rigorously using novel worst-case large deviation techniques is another key contribution of this work.