Balancing Inter-Ring Loads on SONET Dual-Ring without Demand Splitting

In the survivability and simplicity aspect, SONET Self-healing Ring(SHR) is one of the most important schemes for the high-speed telecommunication networks. Since the ring capacity requirement is defined by the largest STS-1 cross-section in the ring, load balancing is the key issue in the design of SONET SHR. Recently, most of the research on load balancing problem have been concentrated on the SONET single-ring case. However, in certain applications, multiple-ring configuration is necessary because of the geographical limitations or the need for extra bandwidth. In this paper, the load balancing problem for SONET dual-ring is considered by assuming symmetric inter-ring demands. We present a linear programming based formulation of the problem. Initial solution and improvement procedures are presented, which solves the routing and interconnection between the two rings for each demand. Computational experiments are performed on various size of networks with randomly generated demand sets. Results show that the proposed algorithm is excellent in both the solution quality and the computational time requirement. The average error bound of the solutions obtained is 0.26% of the optimum.