Dynamic routing of restorable bandwidth-guaranteed tunnels using aggregated network resource usage information

The paper presents new algorithms for dynamic routing of restorable bandwidth-guaranteed paths. We assume that connections are requested one-by-one and there is no prior knowledge of future arrivals. In order to guarantee restorability an alternate link (node) disjoint backup (restoration) path has to be determined, as well as an active path, when the connection is initiated. This joint on-line routing problem is particularly important in optical networks and in MPLS networks for dynamic provisioning of bandwidth-guaranteed or wavelength paths. A simple solution is to find two disjoint paths, but this results in excessive resource usage. Backup path bandwidth usage can be reduced by judicious sharing of backup paths amongst certain active paths while still maintaining restorability. The best sharing performance is achieved if the routing of every path in progress in the network is known to the routing algorithm at the time of a new path setup. We give a new integer programming formulation for this problem. Complete path routing knowledge is a reasonable assumption for a centralized routing algorithm, but is not often desirable, particularly when distributed routing is preferred. We show that a suitably developed algorithm which uses only aggregated information, and not per-path information, is able to perform almost as well as one using complete information. Disseminating this aggregate information is feasible using proposed traffic engineering extensions to routing protocols. We formulate the dynamic restorable bandwidth routing problem in this aggregate information scenario and develop efficient routing algorithms. The performance of our algorithm is close to the complete information bound.