Transmission Link Dimensioning and Service Assignment for Differentiated Protection

We consider the problem of deciding on which transmission systems to carry a given number of services or sessions to minimize link cost and to guarantee a required degree of reliability. The sessions come in a variety of types, each with different requirements and the transmission systems can meet some of these requirements at some cost. We define a new optimization model for the Link Dimensioning and Service Assignment (LDSA) problem, an extension of current work on link dimensioning problems where a common assumption is that there is a single transmission system type on each link.We find that under realistic assumptions about the number of session types and transmission classes, it is possible to solve the LDSA problem to optimality in reasonable time using a combinatorial approach based on the maximal configuration concept. We also propose an efficient stopping criterion for large problems that gives near-optimal solutions within a few seconds. This efficient solution procedure can then be used to solve different network management problems where capacity assignment and survivability issues are involved