Optimal dimensioning of a ring

A ring architecture is of practical interest for a telecommunication operator. It makes it possible to implement automatic protection mechanisms without a substantial increase in cost. This paper deals with the problem of dimensioning a ring a routing its demands such that the total cost of the network is minimized. In a single ring network, the traffic policy has a heavy impact on the cost. Several routing strategies are compared, namely bi-path routing, single-path routing and shortest path routing according to a metric (IP rings). Furthermore, various solutions were introduced to optimize routing and dimensioning: an exact method based on cutting plane algorithms, and a heuristic. Each variant was tested with randomly generated data and some real world networks.