Home circuit grouping in LOBS-HC ring networks: ILP and heuristic approaches

In LOBS-HC (Labeled Optical Burst Switching with Home Circuits) networks, a critical problem is how to optimally group multiple HCs (Home Circuits) from the same source. We investigate this problem in LOBS-HC rings, and formulate it using ILP (Integer Linear Programming). Since the HC grouping problem is NP-Complete, we propose efficient heuristic algorithms for this problem and evaluate their performance. Numerical results show that while our ILP solutions require minimum number of wavelengths, our heuristic algorithms are nearly optimal. Both ILP and heuristic approaches show that bidirectional LOBS-HC rings require fewer resources than unidirectional ones.