Integer SPM: Intelligent path selection for resilient networks

Abstract

The self-protecting multipath (SPM) is a simple and efficient end-to-end protection switching mechanism. It distributes traffic according to a path failure specific load balancing function over several disjoint paths and redistributes it if one of these paths fails. SPMs with optimal load balancing functions (oSPMs) are unnecessarily complex because traffic aggregates potentially need to be split which is an obstacle for the deployment of SPMs in practice. The contribution of this paper is the proposal of an integer SPM (iSPM), i.e., the load balancing functions take only 0/1 values and effectively become path selection functions. In addition, we propose a greedy heuristic to optimize the 0/1 distributions. Finally, we show that the iSPM is only little less efficient than the oSPM and that the computation time of the heuristic for the iSPM is clearly faster than the linear program solver for the oSPM such that the iSPM can be deployed in significantly larger networks. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.