SRLG-diverse routing of multiple circuits in a heterogeneous optical transport network

Abstract

Network planners are often requested to provision multiple physically-diverse high-speed circuits over a large carrier's core (inter-city) DWDM network, which consists of multiple layers and heterogeneous vendor systems. Optimally provisioning such circuits while avoiding shared risk link group (SRLG) failures is an NP-hard problem. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid two-step approach: pre-processing with Integer Linear Programming (ILP) for diverse routing and postprocessing for regenerator placement and wavelength assignment. This approach has been implemented in a prototype network planning tool. According to our experiments, most of the cases for a typical large carrier's core transport network can be solved within 1 minute, even with tens of thousands of binary decision variables, which allows interactive use by network planners.