Hardness of Approximating the Traffic Grooming Problem

National audienceLe groupage est un problème central dans l'étude des réseaux optiques. Dans cet article, on propose le premier résultat d'inapproximabilité pour le problème du groupage, en affirmant la conjecture de Chow et Lin (2004, Networks, 44, 194-202), selon laquelle le groupage est APX-complet. On étudie aussi une version amortie du problème de sous-graphe le plus dense dans un graphe donné: trouver le sous-graphe de taille minimum ayant le degré minimum au moins d, d>=3. On démontre que ce dernier n'a pas d'approximation à un facteur constant

Resilient network dimensioning for optical grid/clouds using relocation

In this paper we address the problem of dimensioning infrastructure, comprising both network and server resources, for large-scale decentralized distributed systems such as grids or clouds. We will provide an overview of our work in this area, and in particular focus on how to design the resulting grid/cloud to be resilient against network link and/or server site failures. To this end, we will exploit relocation: under failure conditions, a request may be sent to an alternate destination than the one under failure-free conditions. We will provide a comprehensive overview of related work in this area, and focus in some detail on our own most recent work. The latter comprises a case study where traffic has a known origin, but we assume a degree of freedom as to where its end up being processed, which is typically the case for e. g., grid applications of the bag-of-tasks (BoT) type or for providing cloud services. In particular, we will provide in this paper a new integer linear programming (ILP) formulation to solve the resilient grid/cloud dimensioning problem using failure-dependent backup routes. Our algorithm will simultaneously decide on server and network capacity. We find that in the anycast routing problem we address, the benefit of using failure-dependent (FD) rerouting is limited compared to failure-independent (FID) backup routing. We confirm our earlier findings in terms of network capacity savings achieved by relocation compared to not exploiting relocation (order of 6-10% in the current case studies)

Grooming

chapter VI.27International audienceState-of-the-art on traffic grooming with a design theory approac

Minimization of the receiver cost in an all-optical ring with a limited number of wavelengths

A new all-optical node architecture, known as \emph{Packet Optical Add-Drop Multiplexer} (POADM), may lead to a considerable cost reduction for the infrastructure of the all-optical metropolitan rings if associated with proper dimensioning studies. We present a dimensioning problem which consists of minimizing the total number of receivers located in POADMs for a metropolitan all-optical ring with a fixed number of wavelengths and a given traffic matrix. We prove that this problem is NP-complete and provide a heuristic. The heuristic principle is to match and to group transmissions instead of considering them independently. We justify the transmission group matching approach by confronting the results of our algorithm with its simplified version. The results obtained allow us to recommend the heuristic in the planning of POADM configurations in all-optical rings with a limited number of wavelengths

Edge-partitioning regular graphs for ring traffic grooming with a priori placement od the ADMs

We study the following graph partitioning problem: Given two positive integers C and Δ, find the least integer M(C,Δ) such that the edges of any graph with maximum degree at most Δ can be partitioned into subgraphs with at most C edges and each vertex appears in at most M(C,Δ) subgraphs. This problem is naturally motivated by traffic grooming, which is a major issue in optical networks. Namely, we introduce a new pseudodynamic model of traffic grooming in unidirectional rings, in which the aim is to design a network able to support any request graph with a given bounded degree. We show that optimizing the equipment cost under this model is essentially equivalent to determining the parameter M(C, Δ). We establish the value of M(C, Δ) for almost all values of C and Δ, leaving open only the case where Δ ≥ 5 is odd, Δ (mod 2C) is between 3 and C − 1, C ≥ 4, and the request graph does not contain a perfect matching. For these open cases, we provide upper bounds that differ from the optimal value by at most one.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Overlay Protection Against Link Failures Using Network Coding

This paper introduces a network coding-based protection scheme against single and multiple link failures. The proposed strategy ensures that in a connection, each node receives two copies of the same data unit: one copy on the working circuit, and a second copy that can be extracted from linear combinations of data units transmitted on a shared protection path. This guarantees instantaneous recovery of data units upon the failure of a working circuit. The strategy can be implemented at an overlay layer, which makes its deployment simple and scalable. While the proposed strategy is similar in spirit to the work of Kamal '07 & '10, there are significant differences. In particular, it provides protection against multiple link failures. The new scheme is simpler, less expensive, and does not require the synchronization required by the original scheme. The sharing of the protection circuit by a number of connections is the key to the reduction of the cost of protection. The paper also conducts a comparison of the cost of the proposed scheme to the 1+1 and shared backup path protection (SBPP) strategies, and establishes the benefits of our strategy.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, accepted by IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networkin

Joint dimensioning of server and network infrastructure for resilient optical grids/clouds

We address the dimensioning of infrastructure, comprising both network and server resources, for large-scale decentralized distributed systems such as grids or clouds. We design the resulting grid/cloud to be resilient against network link or server failures. To this end, we exploit relocation: Under failure conditions, a grid job or cloud virtual machine may be served at an alternate destination (i.e., different from the one under failure-free conditions). We thus consider grid/cloud requests to have a known origin, but assume a degree of freedom as to where they end up being served, which is the case for grid applications of the bag-of-tasks (BoT) type or hosted virtual machines in the cloud case. We present a generic methodology based on integer linear programming (ILP) that: 1) chooses a given number of sites in a given network topology where to install server infrastructure; and 2) determines the amount of both network and server capacity to cater for both the failure-free scenario and failures of links or nodes. For the latter, we consider either failure-independent (FID) or failure-dependent (FD) recovery. Case studies on European-scale networks show that relocation allows considerable reduction of the total amount of network and server resources, especially in sparse topologies and for higher numbers of server sites. Adopting a failure-dependent backup routing strategy does lead to lower resource dimensions, but only when we adopt relocation (especially for a high number of server sites): Without exploiting relocation, potential savings of FD versus FID are not meaningful

Towards Scalable Cost-Effective Service and Survivability Provisioning in Ultra High Speed Networks

Optical transport networks based on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) are considered to be the most appropriate choice for future Internet backbone. On the other hand, future DOE networks are expected to have the ability to dynamically provision on-demand survivable services to suit the needs of various high performance scientific applications and remote collaboration. Since a failure in aWDMnetwork such as a cable cut may result in a tremendous amount of data loss, efficient protection of data transport in WDM networks is therefore essential. As the backbone network is moving towards GMPLS/WDM optical networks, the unique requirement to support DOE’s science mission results in challenging issues that are not directly addressed by existing networking techniques and methodologies. The objectives of this project were to develop cost effective protection and restoration mechanisms based on dedicated path, shared path, preconfigured cycle (p-cycle), and so on, to deal with single failure, dual failure, and shared risk link group (SRLG) failure, under different traffic and resource requirement models; to devise efficient service provisioning algorithms that deal with application specific network resource requirements for both unicast and multicast; to study various aspects of traffic grooming in WDM ring and mesh networks to derive cost effective solutions while meeting application resource and QoS requirements; to design various diverse routing and multi-constrained routing algorithms, considering different traffic models and failure models, for protection and restoration, as well as for service provisioning; to propose and study new optical burst switched architectures and mechanisms for effectively supporting dynamic services; and to integrate research with graduate and undergraduate education. All objectives have been successfully met. This report summarizes the major accomplishments of this project. The impact of the project manifests in many aspects: First, the project addressed many essential problems that arisen in current and future WDM optical networks, and provided a host of innovative solutions though there was no invention or patent filing. This project resulted in more than 2 dozens publications in major journals and conferences (including papers in IEEE Transactions and journals, as well as a book chapter). Our publications have been cited by many peer researchers. In particular, one of our conference papers was nominated for the best paper award of IEEE/Create-Net Broadnets (International Conference on Broadband Communications, Networks, and Systems) 2006. Second, the results and solutions of this project were well received by DOE Labs where presentations were given by the PI. We hope to continue the collaboration with DOE Labs in the future. Third, the project was the first to propose and extensively study multicast traffic grooming, new traffic models such as sliding scheduled traffic model and scheduled traffic model. Our research has sparkled a flurry of recent studies and publications by the research community in these areas. Fourth, the project has benefited a diverse population of students by motivating, engaging, enhancing their learning and skills. The project has been conducted in a manner conducive to the training of students both at graduate and undergraduate levels. As a result, one Ph.D., Dr. Abdur Billah, was graduated. Another Ph.D. student, Tianjian Li, will graduate in January 2007. In addition, four MS students were graduated. One undergraduate student, Jeffrey Alan Shininger, completed his university honors project. Fifth, thanks to the support of this ECPI project, the PI has obtained additional funding from the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Research Lab, and other sources. A few other proposals are pending. Finally, this project has also significantly impacted the curricula and resulted in the enhancement of courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels, therefore strengthening the bond between research and education

Traffic engineering in dynamic optical networks

Traffic Engineering (TE) refers to all the techniques a Service Provider employs to improve the efficiency and reliability of network operations. In IP over Optical (IPO) networks, traffic coming from upper layers is carried over the logical topology defined by the set of established lightpaths. Within this framework then, TE techniques allow to optimize the configuration of optical resources with respect to an highly dynamic traffic demand. TE can be performed with two main methods: if the demand is known only in terms of an aggregated traffic matrix, the problem of automatically updating the configuration of an optical network to accommodate traffic changes is called Virtual Topology Reconfiguration (VTR). If instead the traffic demand is known in terms of data-level connection requests with sub-wavelength granularity, arriving dynamically from some source node to any destination node, the problem is called Dynamic Traffic Grooming (DTG). In this dissertation new VTR algorithms for load balancing in optical networks based on Local Search (LS) techniques are presented. The main advantage of using LS is the minimization of network disruption, since the reconfiguration involves only a small part of the network. A comparison between the proposed schemes and the optimal solutions found via an ILP solver shows calculation time savings for comparable results of network congestion. A similar load balancing technique has been applied to alleviate congestion in an MPLS network, based on the efficient rerouting of Label-Switched Paths (LSP) from the most congested links to allow a better usage of network resources. Many algorithms have been developed to deal with DTG in IPO networks, where most of the attention is focused on optimizing the physical resources utilization by considering specific constraints on the optical node architecture, while very few attention has been put so far on the Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for the carried traffic. In this thesis a novel Traffic Engineering scheme is proposed to guarantee QoS from both the viewpoint of service differentiation and transmission quality. Another contribution in this thesis is a formal framework for the definition of dynamic grooming policies in IPO networks. The framework is then specialized for an overlay architecture, where the control plane of the IP and optical level are separated, and no information is shared between the two. A family of grooming policies based on constraints on the number of hops and on the bandwidth sharing degree at the IP level is defined, and its performance analyzed in both regular and irregular topologies. While most of the literature on DTG problem implicitly considers the grooming of low-speed connections onto optical channels using a TDM approach, the proposed grooming policies are evaluated here by considering a realistic traffic model which consider a Dynamic Statistical Multiplexing (DSM) approach, i.e. a single wavelength channel is shared between multiple IP elastic traffic flows