Optimal capacity planning and RPL placement in carrier Ethernet mesh network design

Ethernet Ring Protection (ERP) has recently emerged to provide protection switching for Ethernet ring topologies with sub-50 ms failover capabilities. ERP's promise to also provide protection in multi-ring mesh packet transport networks will position Ethernet as a serious competitor to conventional SONET/SDH and the technology of choice for carrier networks. Operating ERP in multi-ring mesh networks however comes with unique challenges. This paper presents an optimal ERP capacity design formulation by jointly solving the problem of routing, RPL placement, and ring hierarchy selection. When prior work relied on exhaustive enumeration, our current design is formulated as an integer linear program (ILP) which is shown to be both more capacity and computationally efficient.