Design of Most-Reliable Cubic Networks by Augmentations

The physical support of the Internet infrastructure is fiber-optics network (FON). Since the global Internet traffic doubles each year, FONs are suffering the capacity crunch problem, and several proposals offer content-oriented solutions, combined with a smart spectral utilization. It is well known that the physical implementation of FONs is robust under single failures on its links, or 2-connected. Unfortunately, simultaneous failures occur, and the service is disrupted for some hours per year in average. In this paper we propose a smart network augmentation which solves the previous problems simultaneously. The resulting network is a locally most-reliable 3-connected augmentation. Our methodology to build 3-connected networks is supported by the theory of uniformly most-reliable networks, elementary properties of cubic networks and a careful selection of local searches in a Variable Neighborhood Descent (VND) metaheuristic.