Routing Multiple Traffic Matrices on an IP/MPLS Network

Internet Service Providers wish to optimise the usage of their IP/MPLS network and minimise the congestion caused by traffic demands exceeding the capacity of specific links in their network. When they have at hand multiple future scenarios or predictions of the traffic matrices in their network, in the current state of the art we either reconfigure the weight setting for each individual traffic matrix or configure the best possible weight setting for the set of traffic matrices given. The weight setting problem for multiple traffic matrices consists in optimising the routing of different traffic matrices by configuring the network with appropriate weight settings. When the network is configured with one weight setting for all the traffic matrices considered, we show that there are still potentially congested links. When this situation arises, we recommend the network engineer to use at least two weight settings to configure the network to avoid congestion. For this purpose, we introduce models and properties concerning weight settings and traffic matrices. Acknowledgements I am greatly in debt to Dr Robert Rodošek and Dr Helmut Simonis for having guided me while I was a student at IC-Parc, Imperial College London. I am also thankful to Prof István Maros for undertaking my supervision after my move to Departement of Computing, Imperial College London. Also, I appreciate the help of the ECLPS team for the constant technical support while developping the code and for providing the Metric Optimisation library from Eremin [3] without which I would have been incredibly slowed down. Finally, I thank my wife, Petra, for all her support throughout my work.