Improving network availability—A design perspective

Abstract

The availability of the resources in communication networks is critical, due to the impact that possible disruptions of communication services may have in the society. Therefore, providing adequate levels of availability for every demand in a network is of paramount importance. In this work, we focus on the topological structure of a network to select a set of links that provide a high availability path to be used by the different end-to-end demands. This set of links constitutes a high availability structure (the spine) and is used as the working path for each demand. The backup path for each demand is edge-disjoint with the corresponding working path. This path pair provides end-to-end protection for critical service demands in the network. An exact formulation of the problem is presented and solved for small instances of networks. A heuristic resolution approach with centrality measures is also put forward, with an experimental study comparing the exact and the approximate results.