Lagrangean Heuristic for Anycast Flow Assignment in Connection-Oriented Networks

In this work we address the problem of anycast flow assignment. Anycast is a one-to-one-of-many delivery technique that allows a client to choose a content server of a set of replicated servers. We formulate an optimization problem of anycast flows assignment in a connection-oriented network, which is 0/1 and NP-complete. Thus, we propose a new effective heuristic algorithm based on Lagrangean relaxation technique. To our best survey, this is the first study that applies the Lagrangean relaxation to anycast flow problem. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme by making a comparison with its counterpart using a sample network topology and different scenarios of traffic demand patterns and replica location. Obtained results show advantage of the Lagrangean heuristic over a previously proposed algorithm.