Shared Protection of Virtual Private Networks with Heuristic Methods

In our paper we analysed algorithms that seek the optimal routing configuration in backbone networks with capacity constraints. We investigated a special case when multiple full mesh demand sets (forming Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)) have to be built. We examined the pro-active path based shared protection scheme and investigated heuristic algorithms to calculate the paths. We analysed two different shared protection methods, and we also made comparisons between versions and objective types of the two algorithms. The first algorithm applies Dijkstra’s shortest path calculation, while the second algorithm is based on local search for the next hop. In the analysis and comparison numerical results are presented from calculations on sample networks.