Achieving IP routing stability with optical bypass

The phenomenal growth of the Internet coupled with the emergence of new QoS-aware services in the network has put an enormous strain on current networks. Research efforts towards optimizing the performance of IP networks have been focused on increasing the utilization of the network while minimizing additional resources used. Many such paradigms developed under the umbrella of Traffic and Network Engineering can lead to frequent and significant routing changes in the network when used to tackle short-lived traffic churns, and are therefore not commonly used by network providers. In this work, we present a new network engineering paradigm targeted towards handling short-lived traffic bursts which ensures that IP routing remains unchanged at the cost of marginally higher overall resource usage. We present an ideal Integer Linear Programming (ILP) based optimization problem and present its adaptations to real networks where the actual end-to-end traffic is not known. The latter is of significant practical interest as determination of the IP traffic matrix is non-trivial. Our results are promising and show that the proposed model for IP–optical interoperability model can ensure stable IP operation at a marginally higher resource cost, even when the IP traffic matrix is not known.