Efficient Load Balancing Using the Bees Algorithm

The massive growth of the Internet traffic in the 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 optimising the transport of data traffic over optical fiber ring networks. In this paper, we consider a Weighted Ring Arc-Loading Problem (WRALP), which arises in engineering and planning of the RPR systems. The WRALP is a combinatorial optimisation NP-complete problem. Given a set of point-to-point unidirectional traffic demands of a specified bandwidth, the demands should be assigned to the clockwise or to the counter-clockwise ring in order to yield the best performance. This paper suggests an efficient load balancing algorithm - the Bees Algorithm. We compare our results with nine meta-heuristics used in literature to solve the same problem. The simulation results verify the effectiveness and robustness of the Bees Algorithm.

[1]  Biing-Feng Wang,et al.  Linear time algorithms for the ring loading problem with demand splitting , 2005, J. Algorithms.

[2]  A. E. Eiben,et al.  Introduction to Evolutionary Computing , 2003, Natural Computing Series.

[3]  Peter Kubat,et al.  Balancing Traffic Flows in Resilient Packet Rings , 2005 .

[4]  Dervis Karaboga,et al.  A survey: algorithms simulating bee swarm intelligence , 2009, Artificial Intelligence Review.

[5]  Miguel A. Vega-Rodríguez,et al.  Solving ring loading problems using bio-inspired algorithms , 2011, J. Netw. Comput. Appl..

[6]  Mauro Dell'Amico,et al.  Exact solution of the SONET Ring Loading Problem , 1999, Oper. Res. Lett..

[7]  Sanming Zhou,et al.  Polynomial Time Solvability Of The Weighted Ring Arc-Loading Problem With Integer Splitting , 2004, J. Interconnect. Networks.

[8]  Iraj Saniee,et al.  An optimization problem related to balancing loads on SONET rings , 1994, Telecommun. Syst..

[9]  Hu-Gon Kim,et al.  On the ring loading problem with demand splitting , 2004, Oper. Res. Lett..

[10]  Peter Winkler,et al.  The Ring Loading Problem , 1998, SIAM Rev..

[11]  Kwang Soo Cho,et al.  Efficient Load Balancing Algorithms for a Resilient Packet Ring , 2005 .

[12]  Stein Gjessing,et al.  IEEE 802.17 resilient packet ring tutorial , 2004, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[13]  Edward W. Knightly,et al.  The IEEE 802.17 media access protocol for high-speed metropolitan-area resilient packet rings , 2004, IEEE Network.

[14]  Sung-Soo Kim,et al.  Ant Colony Optimization for SONET Ring Loading Problem , 2008 .