Point of presence design in Internet protocol networks with performance guarantees

In this paper, we propose a model for the point of presence (POP) design problem in Internet protocol (IP) networks with performance guarantees, where a POP is a node composed of several interconnected co-located backbone routers within a central office. This problem consists of selecting the number of routers and their types, selecting the interface card types, connecting the access and the backbone links to the ports and selecting the link types between the co-located routers. Furthermore, the model considers the routing of the IP traffic. The performance guarantees we refer to are bandwidth guarantees between the routers for the normal state of the POP and also for all failure scenarios of interest to the network planner. A tabu search heuristic to find solutions for real-size instances of the problem is proposed. Finally, we present a systematic set of experiments designed to assess the performance of the proposed heuristic.