Service curve based routing subject to deterministic QoS constraints

The problem of traffic engineered routing subject to deterministic QoS constraints with a minimum cost objective is considered. A novel blend of generic service curves as abstraction of network links of the associated network calculus under min-plus algebra and of existing heuristics for the restricted shortest path problem, is presented as a generic approach applicable in arbitrary network infrastructures. In particular, we define load-dependent link cost and present in pseudo-code notation the details of the different steps of the developed algorithm, which comprises of a pre-computation and an on-demand phase. A tabu-search is deployed as a local search heuristic to exploit the neighborhood of a pre-computed minimum weight path. The presented approach provides a generic technical solution for minimum-cost routing subject to deterministic QoS constraints, which includes only a reasonably limited number of tuning knobs and thus facilitates the network operator to concentrate on the rather economical task of link cost definition.