1 A Better Approach to Reliable Multi-Path Provisioning

Abstract — We study the problem of reliably provisioning traffic in high-capacity backbone mesh networks supporting virtual concatenation (VCAT). VCAT enables a connection to be inversely multiplexed on to multiple paths, a feature that has many advantages over conventional single-path provisioning. We propose improved routing algorithms which use minimum-cost flow to find efficient collections of paths that satisfy the traffic requests. We first investigate the performance of our scheme under a uniform setting with symmetric traffic distribution and equal link capacities. We then apply our algorithm in a more realistic setting with asymmetric traffic and differing link capacities. Results show that our algorithm is an attractive approach in both the uniform and non-uniform settings, and much more effective than previously proposed schemes. Our study in the non-uniform setting is significant as it gives insight into the performance of our algorithm under more realistic scenarios. I