A heuristic approach for solving the virtual topology design problem in next generation networks

The Next Generation Internet is intended to be an IP/WDM network which can be optimized using virtual topology based traffic engineering. In this paper we study the NP-hard Virtual Topology Design (VTD) problem for which we propose a MILP (Mixed Integer Linear Program) formulation with a tradeoff object between saving resources and minimum delay traffic handling. To solve it for large scale backbone networks, we propose a multi-weighted graph illustration of the problem and use a Pareto-based heuristic to solve it. We have applied the proposed heuristic for a load-based weight and a transit-based weight. The obtained results have shown better solutions for the transit-based weight.