Optimization in Telecommunication Networks

Network design and network synthesis have been the classical optimization problems intelecommunication for a long time. In the recent past, there have been many technologicaldevelopments such as digitization of information, optical networks, internet, and wirelessnetworks. These developments have led to a series of new optimization problems. Thismanuscript gives an overview of the developments in solving both classical and moderntelecom optimization problems.We start with a short historical overview of the technological developments. Then,the classical (still actual) network design and synthesis problems are described with anemphasis on the latest developments on modelling and solving them. Classical results suchas Menger’s disjoint paths theorem, and Ford-Fulkerson’s max-flow-min-cut theorem, butalso Gomory-Hu trees and the Okamura-Seymour cut-condition, will be related to themodels described. Finally, we describe recent optimization problems such as routing andwavelength assignment, and grooming in optical networks.operations research and management science;

Network protection with guaranteed recovery times using recovery domains

We consider the problem of providing network protection that guarantees the maximum amount of time that flow can be interrupted after a failure. This is in contrast to schemes that offer no recovery time guarantees, such as IP rerouting, or the prevalent local recovery scheme of Fast ReRoute, which often over-provisions resources to meet recovery time constraints. To meet these recovery time guarantees, we provide a novel and flexible solution by partitioning the network into failure-independent “recovery domains”, where within each domain, the maximum amount of time to recover from a failure is guaranteed. We show the recovery domain problem to be NP-Hard, and develop an optimal solution in the form of an MILP for both the case when backup capacity can and cannot be shared. This provides protection with guaranteed recovery times using up to 45% less protection resources than local recovery. We demonstrate that the network-wide optimal recovery domain solution can be decomposed into a set of easier to solve subproblems. This allows for the development of flexible and efficient solutions, including an optimal algorithm using Lagrangian relaxation, which simulations show to converge rapidly to an optimal solution. Additionally, an algorithm is developed for when backup sharing is allowed. For dynamic arrivals, this algorithm performs better than the solution that tries to greedily optimize for each incoming demand.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF grant CNS-1017800)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant CNS-0830961)United States. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (grant HDTRA-09-1-005)United States. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (grant HDTRA1-07-1-0004)United States. Air Force (Air Force contract # FA8721-05-C-0002

A two-step approach to restorable dynamic QoS routing

Aiming at minimizing the combined bandwidth cost of a pair of disjoint active and backup paths, a popular approach to designing Restorable Dynamic QoS Routing schemes is based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation. Owing to the very different natures of active and backup paths, we found this approach problematic. In this paper, we propose a simple alternative approach, called two-step routing. In the first step, active path is found using the widest-shortest path (WSP) routing. In the second step, the corresponding backup path is determined using one of the three variants of shortest-widest path (SWP) routing, Basic-SWP, Approximate-SWP and Composite-SWP. Combining both steps, three novel restorable routing algorithms, SBW, SAW and SCW, are obtained. Comparing with the existing best-known algorithms, we show that our two-step routing approach yields noticeably lower call blocking probability, shorter active path length, and adjustable backup path length (depending on the SWP variant adopted). Besides, our two-step routing approach gives a much shorter running time than the ILP approach, which makes it more attractive for dynamic routing.published_or_final_versio

Resilient availability and bandwidth-aware multipath provisioning for media transfer over the internet (Best Paper Award)

Traditional routing in the Internet is best-effort. Path differentiation including multipath routing is a promising technique to be used for meeting QoS requirements of media intensive applications. Since different paths have different characteristics in terms of latency, availability and bandwidth, they offer flexibility in QoS and congestion control. Additionally protection techniques can be used to enhance the reliability of the network. This paper studies the problem of how to optimally find paths ensuring maximal bandwidth and resiliency of media transfer over the network. In particular, we propose two algorithms to reserve network paths with minimal new resources while increasing the availability of the paths and enabling congestion control. The first algorithm is based on Integer Linear Programming which minimizes the cost of the paths and the used resources. The second one is a heuristic-based algorithm which solves the scalability limitations of the ILP approach. The algorithms ensure resiliency against any single link failure in the network. The experimental results indicate that using the proposed schemes the connections availability improve significantly and a more balanced load is achieved in the network compared to the shortest path-based approaches

Computation of Dispersion Penalty for the Analysis of WDM Link Quality

The provisioning of light path over WDM/DWDM network is a challenging factor, which depends on various physical layer impairments such as dispersion in fiber. We proposed a light path provisioning mechanism by considering the effect of dispersion in fiber termed as dispersion penalty, which is the prominent effect at high speed WDM network. In the case of non-ideal filter, light path provisioning without considering the physical layer impairments does not satisfy the signal quality guaranteed transmission. In this algorithm, Quality of Service is described in terms of dispersion penalty values with an assumption that the entire client has a requirement of penalty less than 2 Db. Here we have analyzed the degradation in bit rate due to the effect of dispersion. The maximum possible length of fiber is also reduced due to high dispersion in fiber. Dispersion penalty is the increment in the received power to eliminate the effect of some undesirable distortion in optical fiber. Dispersion penalty is calculated in terms of bit rate and band width for each data path. The proposal of dispersion penalty budgeting is to ensure that the optical power reaching the receiver is adequate under all circumstances. The proposed algorithm defines a mechanism for effective light path provisioning by comparing the requirement of client and the available resources of the network

Network protection with multiple availability guarantees

We develop a novel network protection scheme that provides guarantees on both the fraction of time a flow has full connectivity, as well as a quantifiable minimum grade of service during downtimes. In particular, a flow can be below the full demand for at most a maximum fraction of time; then, it must still support at least a fraction q of the full demand. This is in contrast to current protection schemes that offer either availability-guarantees with no bandwidth guarantees during the downtime, or full protection schemes that offer 100% availability after a single link failure. We develop algorithms that provide multiple availability guarantees and show that significant capacity savings can be achieved as compared to full protection. If a connection is allowed to drop to 50% of its bandwidth for 1 out of every 20 failures, then a 24% reduction in spare capacity can be achieved over traditional full protection schemes. In addition, for the case of q = 0, corresponding to the standard availability constraint, an optimal pseudo-polynomial time algorithm is presented.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF grants CNS-1116209)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF grants CNS-0830961)United States. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (grant HDTRA-09-1-005)United States. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (grant HDTRA1-07-1-0004)United States. Air Force (Air Force contract # FA8721-05-C-0002

Improving Real-Time Data Dissemination Performance by Multi Path Data Scheduling in Data Grids

The performance of data grids for data intensive, real-time applications is highly dependent on the data dissemination algorithm employed in the system. Motivated by this fact, this study first formally defines the real-time splittable data dissemination problem (RTS/DDP) where data transfer requests can be routed over multiple paths to maximize the number of data transfers to be completed before their deadlines. Since RTS/DDP is proved to be NP-hard, four different heuristic algorithms, namely kSP/ESMP, kSP/BSMP, kDP/ESMP, and kDP/BSMP are proposed. The performance of these heuristic algorithms is analyzed through an extensive set of data grid system simulation scenarios. The simulation results reveal that a performance increase up to 8 % as compared to a very competitive single path data dissemination algorithm is possible