Routing and wavelength assignment with protection: A quadratic unconstrained binary optimization approach enabled by Digital Annealer technology

Routing and wavelength assignment with protection is an important problem in telecommunications. Given an optical network and incoming connection requests, a commonly studied variant of the problem aims to grant a maximum number of requests by assigning lightpaths with minimum network resource usage, while ensuring the provided services remain functional in the case of a single-link failure through dedicated protection paths. We consider a version where alternative lightpaths for requests are assumed to be given as a precomputed set and show that it is NP-hard. We formulate the problem as an Integer Programming (IP) model and also use it as a foundation to develop a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) model. We present necessary and sufficient conditions on objective function parameters to prioritize request granting objective over wavelength-link usage for both models, and a sufficient condition ensuring the exactness of the QUBO model. Moreover, we implement a problem-specific branch-and-cut algorithm for the IP model and employ a new quantum-inspired technology, Digital Annealer (DA), for the QUBO model. We conduct computational experiments on a large suite of nontrivial instances to assess the efficiency and efficacy of all of these approaches as well as two problem-specific heuristics. Although the objective penalty coefficient values that guarantee the exactness of the QUBO model were outside the acceptable range for DA, it always yielded feasible solutions even with smaller values in practice. The results show that the emerging technology DA outperforms the considered techniques coupled with GUROBI in finding mostly significantly better or as good solutions in two minutes compared to two-hour run time, whereas problem-specific heuristics fail to be competitive.