A principle task in parallel and distributed systems is to reduce the communication load in the interconnection network, as this is usually the major bottleneck for the performance of distributed applications. In this paper we introduce a framework for solving on-line problems that aim to minimize the congestion (i.e. the maximum load of a network link) in general topology networks.

We apply this framework to the problem of on-line routing of virtual circuits and to a dynamic data management problem. For both scenarios we achieve a competitive ratio of O(log³n) with respect to the congestion of the network links.

Our on-line algorithm for the routing problem has the remarkable property that it is oblivious, i.e., the path chosen for a virtual circuit is independent of the current network load. Oblivious routing strategies can easily be implemented in distributed environments and have therefore been intensively studied for certain network topologies as e.g. meshes, tori and hypercubic networks. This is the first oblivious path selection algorithm that achieves a polylogarithmic competitive ratio in general networks.