Network Traffic Engineering with Varied Levels of Protection in the Next Generation Internet

In this paper, we consider the network traffic engineering problem for provisioning tunnels in a backbone network where services with varied levels of protection are offered. Network protection to address for a failure continues to be a critical issue for the Next Generation Internet. Our modeling framework allows protection at various levels to be considered in a unified manner through the notion of cycles that are made up of a disjoint pair of paths where the network may be capacitated by both bandwidth as well as tunnel constraint. We also consider a variety of network goals including the ability to provide as much bandwidth as possible for best-effort services along with guaranteed protection services and develop a composite objective function. We then present two heuristic for solving the models presented. Through our studies of different network topologies, we show the convergence as well as the effectiveness of our approach in considering multiple goals in a unified manner. For example, we have shown the tradeoff between accepting new requests of protection service classes and providing residual bandwidth for best- effort services. Finally, our results also show that capacity and tunnels can have equally important roles in ensuring effective traffic engineering of a network.