Capacity and Survivability Models for Telecommunication Networks

Designing low-cost networks that survive certain failure situations is one of the prime tasks in the telecommunication industry. In this paper we survey the development of models for network survivability used in practice in the last ten years. We show how algorithms integrating polyhedral combinatorics, linear programming, and various heuristic ideas can help solve real-world network dimensioning instances to optimality or within reasonable quality guarantees in acceptable running times. The most general problem type we address is the following. Let a communication demand between each pair of nodes of a telecommunication network be given. We consider the problem of choosing, among a discrete set of possible capacities, which capacity to install on each of the possible edges of the network in order to (i) satisfy all demands, (ii) minimize the building cost of the network. In addition to determining the network topology and the edge capacities we have to provide, for each demand, a routing such that (iii) no path can carry more than a given percentage of the demand, (iv) no path in the routing exceeds a given length. We also have to make sure that (v) for every single node or edge failure, a certain percentage of the demand is reroutable. Moreover, for all failure situations feasible routings must be computed. The model described above has been developed in cooperation with a German mobile phone provider. We present a mixed-integer programming formulation of this model and computational results with data from practice.