Solving the Ring Arc-Loading Problem using a Hybrid Scatter Search Algorithm

Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) is a standard that uses Ethernet switching and a dual counter-rotating ring topology to provide SONET-like network resiliency and optimised bandwidth usage, while it delivers multipoint Ethernet/IP services. An important optimisation problem arising in this context is the Weighted Ring Arc Loading Problem (WRALP). That is the design of a direct path for each request in a communication network, in such a way that high load on the arcs will be avoided, where an arc is an edge endowed with a direction. The load of an arc is defined as the total weight of those requests routed through the arc in its direction. WRALP ask for a routing scheme such that the maximum load on the arcs will be minimum. In this paper we study the loading problem without demand splitting and for solving it we propose a Hybrid Scatter Search (HSS) algorithm. Coupled with the Scatter Search algorithm we use a Tabu Search algorithm to locate the global minimum. We show that HSS is able to achieve feasible solutions to WRALP instances, improving the results obtained by previous approaches.

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