Providing resiliency for optical grids by exploiting relocation: A dimensioning study based on ILP

Grids use a form of distributed computing to tackle complex computational and data processing problems scientists are presented with today. When designing an (optical) network supporting grids, it is essential that it can overcome single network failures, for which several protection schemes have been devised in the past. In this work, we extend the existing Shared Path protection scheme by incorporating the anycast principle typical of grids: a user typically does not care on what specific server this job gets executed and is merely interested in its timely delivery of results. Therefore, in contrast with Classical Shared Path protection (CSP), we will not necessarily provide a backup path between the source and the original destination. Instead, we allow to relocate the job to another server location if we can thus provide a backup path which comprises less wavelengths than the one CSP would suggest. We assess the bandwidth savings enabled by relocation in a quantitative dimensioning case study on an European and an American network topology, exhibiting substantial savings of the number of required wavelengths (in the order of 11–50%, depending on network topology and server locations). We also investigate how relocation affects the computational load on the execution servers. The case study is based on solving a grid network dimensioning problem: we present Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulations for both the traditional CSP and the new resilience scheme exploiting relocation (SPR). We also outline a strategy to deal with the anycast principle: assuming we are given just the origins and intensity of job arrivals, we derive a static (source, destination)-based demand matrix. The latter is then used as input to solve the network dimensioning ILP for an optical circuit-switched WDM network.