Optimization of p-cycles for survivable anycasting streaming

Abstract

Intensive and extensive development of computer networks generates the problem of providing a suitably high level of network survivability. A lot of research has been done in this area in recent years, including studies associated with the use of a modern tool called p-cycles. p-Cycles not only provide a high level of protection, but also achieve it at a quite low cost. Until now, p-cycles have been widely used in the context of unicast and multicast traffic. In this paper, we apply p-cycles for protecting the anycast traffic. According to our knowledge, this is the first paper in the literature on this topic. To solve the problem stated, we propose an original approach which combines protection on the level of physical links with protection on the flow level. By using special properties of p-cycles, we formulate the solution algorithm dedicated to minimising the total cost of full protection. Comparing the proposed algorithm with several ad hoc (but reasonable) methods we found, in extensive numerical tests, that the proposed methodology outperforms other algorithms.