Designing Hierarchical Survivable Networks

Abstract

As the computer, communication, and entertainment industries begin to integrate phone, cable, and video services and to invest in new technologies such as fiber optic cables, interruptions in service can cause considerable customer dissatisfaction and even be catastrophic. In this environment, network providers want to offer high levels of servicein both serviceability (e.g., high bandwidth) and survivability (failure protection)-and to segment their markets, providing better technology and more robust configurations to certain key customers. We study core models with three types of customers (critical, primary, and secondary) and two types of services/technologies (primary and secondary). The network must connect primary customers using primary (high bandwidth) services and, additionally, contain a back-up path connecting certain critical primary customers. Secondary customers require only single connectivity to other customers and can use either primary or secondary facilities. We propose a general multi-tier survivable network design model to configure cost effective networks for this type of market segmentation. When costs are triangular, we show how to optimally solve single-tier subproblems with two critical customers as a matroid intersection problem. We also propose and analyze the worst-case performance of tailored heuristics for several special cases of the two-tier model. Depending upon the particular problem setting, the heuristics have worst-case performance ratios ranging between 1.25 and 2.6. We also provide examples to show that the performance ratios for these heuristics are the best possible.

Hierarchical Survivable Network Design Problems

“…There are few studies that consider the design of two level networks with survivability requirements in both levels. The majority of such studies are on designing ring/ring networks (Thomadsen and Stidsen [19], Carroll and Mc Garraghy [3]), and most of the approaches proposed are heuristic approaches (Shi and Fonseca [17], Balakrishnan et al [1]). The contribution of the present paper is to propose formulations and exact solution methods for the two level survivable network design problem where both rings and 2-edge connected networks are used to ensure survivability.…”

“…Finally, as examples of other types of two-level network design problems, we mention the ring/chain problem studied by Lee and Kon [13] and the capacitated ring/tree problem studied by Hill and Voß [10]. 1 This work has been supported by "Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia", Spain (research project MTM2012-36163-C06-01). The research of the third author is supported by the Turkish Academy of Sciences.…”

Survivability in Hierarchical Telecommunications Networks Under Dual Homing

“…Proestki and Sinclair (2000) contributed an efficient heuristic for the same problem. Balakrishnan et al (1998) generalized the two-level hierarchical survivable network design to that of multitiers and provided a modeling framework that unifies different technological layers and connectivity requirements under the viewpoint of cost effectiveness. Most of the hierarchical design problems in the literature can be seen as special cases of these general problems.…”

Wide area telecommunication network design: application to the Alberta SuperNet

“…A large body of the research addresses pure topological problems like the Steiner tree prob lem (STP) (eg Koch and Martin, 1998;Lucena and Beasley, 1998;Patterson et al, 1999;Vahdati Daneshmand, 2001a,b, 2003;Costa et al, 2006) or problems defined on par ticular topologies like trees (Randazzo and Luna, 2001 ;Gzara and Goffin, 2005), rings (eg Armony et al, 2000;Cham berland and Sans?, 2000), or meshes (Costa, 2005;Kerivin and Mahjoub, 2005;Magnanti and Raghavan, 2005). Several papers address hierarchical problems that associate a par ticular technology with each level (eg Balakrishnan et al, 1998;Chamberland and Sans?, 2001;Chopra and Tsai, 2002;Labb? et al, 2004).…”