The traffic network and the communication network play a more and more important role in modern life. Almost all people use these two networks everyday. Thus the governments around the world increase the investment in their infrastructure. However, increasing the infrastructure alone, such as broadening the road and the bandwidth, can not meet the growing demand. More importantly, we must focus on optimizing management and making the best use of existing infrastructure in order to improve the performance of these two networks. The key to improving the efficiency is to design effective path strategies. In this paper, we first give a brief introduction of the similarities and the differences between the traffic network and the communication network. Then we review the route choice strategies used to guide the vehicle and path strategies used to guide the pedestrian in the transportation network, and the routing strategies in the communication network. By comparison, we find that the strategies based on the global information are better than those based on the local information. However, due to the factor of the network size, the strategies based on the local information are more suitable for the communication network, and the strategies based on the global information are more suitable for the transportation network.

transportation network  /  pedestrian network  /  communication network