Multi‐hour design of survivable classical IP networks

Most of Internet intra-domain routing protocols (OSPF, RIP, and IS–IS) are based on shortest path routing. The path length is defined as the sum of metrics associated with the path links. These metrics are often managed by the network administrator. In this context, the design of an Internet backbone network consists in dimensioning the network (routers and transmission links) and establishing the metric. Many requirements have to be satisfied. First, Internet traffic is not static as significant variations can be observed during the day. Second, many failures can occur (cable cuts, hardware failures, software failures, etc.). In this paper, we present algorithms (meta-heuristics and greedy heuristic) to design Internet backbone networks, taking into account the multi-hour behaviour of traffic and some survivability requirements. Many multi-hour and protection strategies are studied and numerically compared in this paper. Our algorithms can be extended to integrate other quality of service constraints. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.