Heuristic Approach for the Design of a High Availability Structure

Communication networks are critical in today's society and the availability of resources is a major concern for network managers. Adequate levels of availability for every demand must be provided in a network, to assure an adequate grade of service to the users. In this work, a set of edges is selected to provide a high availability path (the working path) and/or a high availability path pair (working path plus edge-disjoint backup path) for each demand. Exact formulations of the problems are presented and a heuristic solution approach considering an edge-betweenness centrality measure is put forward. Experimental results comparing this heuristic with other heuristics previously proposed, are presented.