Supporting Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) in Backbone Networks: Design of Robust Routing Strategies

In this paper, we consider the problem of providing IPTV services by designing routing strategies to handle catastrophic failures in a backbone network. In a typical IPTV architecture, broadcast TV is distributed from two sources to multiple destinations (for resiliency). The aim of this paper is to develop a solution technique for supporting IPTV services in a reliable and cost effective manner. In terms of reliability, any links that go through a common physical route (e.g., fiber, conduit) belong to the same Shared Risk Link Group (SRLG), which is subject to a single point of failure. This paper presents a novel Integer Programming (IP) formulation, in which the objective is to minimize the communication cost such that we have two SRLG-diverse paths from each of the two sources to every destination. In our theoretical study, we demonstrate that a special case of this problem can be solved in polynomial time. The results from our empirical study using real network topologies indicate that the proposed approach can significantly reduce the communication cost compared to the existing heuristic approaches.