Solving the Non-split Weighted Ring Arc-Loading Problem in a Resilient Packet Ring using Particle Swarm Optimization

Massive growth of the Internet traffic in last decades has motivated the design of high-speed optical networks. Resilient Packet Ring (RPR), also known as IEEE 802.17, is a standard designed for the optimized transport of data traffic over optical fiber ring networks. Its design is to provide the resilience found in SONET/SDH networks but instead of setting up circuit oriented connections, providing a packet based transmission. This is to increase the efficiency of Ethernet and IP services. In this paper, a weighted ring arc-loading problem (WRALP) is considered which arises in engineering and planning of the RPR systems (combinatorial optimization NPcomplete problem). Specifically, for a given set of non-split and uni-directional point-to-point demands (weights), the objective is to find the routing for each demand (i.e., assignment of the demand to either clockwise or counter-clockwise ring) so that the maximum arc load is minimized. This paper suggests four variants of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), combined with a Local Search (LS) method to efficient non-split traffic loading on the RPR. Numerical simulation results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods.