Efficient Heuristics for Planning GMPLS Transport Networks

With the multi-granularity switching capability taken into consideration in WDM-based transport networks, most existing routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) planning algorithms become economically infeasible. Therefore, efficient implementation of the whole traffic hierarchy defined in generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) has to be delivered by suitably designed routing, grouping, and assignment planning algorithms. This requires defining a new transport planning problem, which we call the routing and multi-granular paths assignment (RMGPA) problem. The objective of the problem is to minimize the total weighted node port count. Due to the computational complexity of the problem, only very-small-sized problems can be solved exactly through mixed integer linear programming (MILP) optimization. In this paper, we propose novel heuristics that are capable of solving large-sized problems in a reasonable amount of time.