Abstract: In the survivability
and simplicity aspect, SONET Self-healing Ring(SHR) is one of the most
important schemes for the high-speed telecommunication networks. Since
the ring capacity requirement is defined by the largest STS-1 cross section
in the ring, load balancing is the key issue in the design of SONET SHR.
Recently, most of the research on load balancing problem have been concentrated
on the SONET single-ring case. However, in certain applications, multiple-ring
configuration is necessary because of the geographical limitations or the
need for extra bandwidth.
In this paper, the load balacing
problem for SONET dual-ring is considered by assuming symmetric inter-ring
demands. We present a linear programming based formulation of the problem.
Initial solution and improvement procedures are presented, which solves
the routing and interconnection between the two rings for each demand.
Computational experiments are performed on various size of networks with
randomly generated demand sets. Results show that the proposed algorithm
is excellent in both the solution quality and the computational time requirement.
The average error bound of the solutions optained is 0.26% of the optimum.