Abstract
The authors consider a form of packet routing known as hot potato routing or deflection routing. Its striking feature is that there are no buffers at intermediate nodes. Thus packets are always moving (possibly in the 'wrong' direction), giving rise to the term 'hot potato'. They give a simple deterministic algorithm that on a nn torus will route a random instance in 2n+O(log n) steps with high probability. They add random delays to this algorithm so that it solves the permutation routing problem on the torus in 9n steps with high probability, on every instance. On a hypercube with N=2n nodes, they give a simple deterministic algorithm that will route a random instance in O(n) steps with high probability. Various other results are discussed.