Enhanced Optimal and Heuristic Solutions of the Routing Problem in Light Trail Networks

The technology of light-trails is an efficient and feasible alternative for IP transport over all-optical networks. This paper tackles the routing problem of light-trails with the solution objective of minimizing the number of needed light-trails to accommodate an offered traffic matrix. We present two enhancements to the integer linear programming (ILP) formulation of the routing problem. We also propose a computationally efficient routing heuristic for use with static and incremental traffic models. The efficiency of the proposed heuristic is confirmed using example problems of different network topologies.