Dynamic sharing mechanism for guaranteed availability in MPLS based networks

This paper proposes an algorithm for allocating connections with bandwidth and availability requirements in a telecommunication network where the connections may share resources in their backup paths. The allocation is dynamic in the sense that allocation requests have random arrival times, source and destinations, and allocated connections have a random duration. The algorithm has been designed for core backbone networks with continuous bandwidth distribution, like for example MPLS networks. An efficient bandwidth utilization was obtained by an intelligent sharing mechanism that takes into account the properties of networks with continuous bandwidth allocation. The problem may be formulated as an NIP (Nonlinear Integer Programming) problem. However, due to the well known complexity and scalability limitations in solving this kind of problems, the solution is based on heuristic procedures. A performance comparison with previously published algorithms is carried out for some ”reference networks”, demonstrating a substantially better resource usage.