A novel heuristic for topology planning and evolution of optical mesh networks

We consider the problem of determining an optimal facilities route topology for an optical mesh-restorable network. In general, there will be a set of existing rights-of-way for cable ducts etc. and a limited number of new acquisition prospects for topology evolution. The enhancement of network connectivity is of particular interest in a mesh-based transport network, but new rights-of-way can be very expensive. The interaction between the edge costs and capacity savings in a mesh network is also different than in prior topology design problems. We describe a three-stage heuristic based on a particular hypothesis about the problem. The heuristic runs quickly and produces solutions that typically cannot be improved upon by the optimal formulation in 6 to 12 hours and are within 8% of optimal in cases where the optimum reference could be solved. The heuristic also provides a fairly tight upper bound to help in solving the complete problem