Investigation of hyper-heuristics for designing survivable virtual topologies in optical WDM networks

Abstract

In optical WDM networks, a fiber failure may result in a serious amount of data loss, hence, designing survivable virtual topologies is a critical problem. We propose four different hyper-heuristic approaches to solve this problem, each of which is based on a different category of nature inspired heuristics: evolutionary algorithms, ant colony optimization, simulated annealing, and adaptive iterated constructive search are used as the heuristic selection methods in the hyper-heuristics. Experimental results show that, all proposed hyper-heuristic approaches are successful in designing survivable virtual topologies. Furthermore, the ant colony optimization based hyper-heuristic outperforms the others. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.