Routing guaranteed bandwidth virtual paths with simultaneous maximization of additional flows

We consider the problem of on-line routing of bandwidth-guaranteed virtual paths. The basic idea is to route virtual paths such that enough spare capacity is left for accommodating weighted additional demands simultaneously between all other source-destination pairs. The problem formulation results in an integer linear program (ILP), the solution of which gives the optimal routing. However solving the ILP is NP-hard and so we resort to heuristics. We assign weights to the links in the network and then use shortest path routing. The novel aspect of the weight assignment is that the weights take into account the residual link capacities, as well as the number of source-destination pairs that could potentially use the link. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm performs better than existing algorithms in the literature (e.g. MIRA) for a variety of network topologies and traffic scenarios.