Distributed Partial Information Management (DPIM) schemes for survivable networks - Part I

This paper describes a novel framework, called Distributed Partial Information Management (or DPIM). It addresses several major challenges in achieving efficient shared path protection under distributed control with only partial information, including (1) how much partial information about existing active and backup paths (or APs and BPs respectively) is maintained and exchanged; (2) how to obtain a good estimate of the bandwidth needed by a candidate BP, called BBW, and subsequently select a pair of AP and BP for a connection establishment request so as to minimize total bandwidth consumption and/or maximize revenues; (3) how to distributively allocate minimal BBW (and deallocate maximal BBW) via distributed signaling; and (4) how to update and subsequently exchange the partial information. A DPIM-based scheme using Integer Linear Programming is described to illustrate our approach. In addition, an ultrafast and efficient heuristic scheme is described. With about the same amount of partial information, such a heuristic-based DPIM scheme can achieve almost as a good performance as the ILP-based DPIM scheme, and a much better performance than another ILP-based scheme described in [1]. The paper also presents an elegant method to support dynamic requests for protected, unprotected, and pre-emptable connections in the unified DPIM framework.