Variable aggregation in the ILP design of WDM networks with dedicated protection

In wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) networks a link failure may cause the failure of several high-bit-rate optical channels, thereby leading to large data loss. Recently, various protection and restoration mechanisms have been proposed to efficiently deal with this problem in mesh networks. Among them, dedicated path protection (DPP) is a promising candidate because of its ultra-fast restoration time and robustness. In this work we investigate the issue of planning and optimization of WDM networks with DPP. Integer linear programming (ILP), in particular, is one of the most common exact method to solve the design optimization problem for protected WDM networks. Traditional ILP formalizations to solve this problem rely on the classical flow or route formulation approaches, but both these approaches suffer from a excessively high computational burden. In this paper, we present a variable-aggregation method that has the ability of significantly reducing the complexity of the traditional flow formulation. We compare also the computational burden of flow formulation with variable aggregation both with the classical flow and route formulations. The comparison is carried out by applying the three alternative methods to the optimization of two case-study networks.