Spare Capacity Allocation in Backbone Networks

David Tipper, pitt/sis

Tuesday, October 17
Noon - SENSQ 5317
Free pizza for attendees starting at 11:45 a.m.

Hosted by Jose' Brustoloni

Abstract

Communication networks are part of the critical infrastructure upon which society depends. The goal of network survivability is to develop cost-effective techniques which can be deployed to ensure the functionality of communication networks in the face of failures and physical/cyber attacks. In this talk, we consider the problem of provisioning spare capacity in backbone networks in order to meet survivability requirements. Preliminary results on two novel approaches are discussed. The first is using a risk based approach to allocate the spare capacity in the network. The second approach considers the multi-layer aspect of backbone networks and a novel matrix based method is developed to model network failure dependency across layers. Multi-layer spare capacity allocation optimization problems are formulated using the matrix format to determine the location and the amount of spare capacity in each network layer. For scalability, a fast and efficient approximation algorithm based on our previous successive survivable routing (SSR) technique is developed. Numerical results for a variety of networks show that near optimal solutions are found by the proposed heuristic algorithm quickly.

Biography of Speaker

David Tipper is an Associate Professor in the Telecommunications Program with a secondary appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to joining Pitt in 1994, he was an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University in Clemson, SC. He is a graduate of the University of Arizona (PhD, EE, MS, SIE) and Virginia Tech (BS, EE). His current research interests are network design and traffic restoration procedures for survivable networks, network control (i.e., routing, flow control, etc.), performance analysis techniques, wireless and wired network design. Professor Tipper's research has been supported by grants from various government and corporate sources such as NSF, DARPA, NIST, IBM and AT&T. He is a Senior member of IEEE and has been on numerous conference technical committees including serving as the Technical Program Chair of the Fourth IEEE International Workshop on the Design of Reliable Communication Networks (DRCN 2003). He was a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Network and Systems Management from 2000 to 2005.