WDM Network Design by ILP Models Based on Flow Aggregation

Overview

Planning and optimization of WDM networks has raised much interest among the research community in the last years. Integer Linear Programming (ILP) is the most used exact method to perform this task and many studies have been published concerning this issue. Unfortunately many works have shown that, even for small networks, the ILP formulations can easily overwhelm the capabilities of today state-of-the-art computing facilities. So this paper focuses attention on ILP model computational efficiency in order to provide a more effective tool in view of direct planning or other benchmarking applications. The formulation exploits flow aggregation and consists in a new ILP formulation that allows one to reach optimal solutions with less computational effort compared to other ILP approaches.