Survivable design of reconfigurable MPLS VPN networks

Abstract

MPLS has become an increasingly common technology for guaranteed transport services for carrying customer traffic. We consider the survivable design problem from the perspective of an MPLS VPN network provider where the data rate required is dynamically configurable based on customers' traffic demands. Network optimization formulations for global design and end-to-end fast reroute design are presented. For the global design model, we present two variations: global sequential redesign and selective sequential redesign. Through computational work, we observe that as networks get larger, the relative cost of making that network survivable goes down. Furthermore, as a network of a given number of nodes increases its connectivity, the cost of survivability goes down. Finally, the global sequential redesign and selective sequential redesign methods produce survivable design costs that are comparable, while they are approximately 28% less expensive than the end-to-end fast reroute design approach for survivability.