Models of Dynamic Reconfiguration of Telecommunication Networks

Dynamic reconfiguration is one of the most important problems in the field of network management. In the case of some part of the network being damaged the system should maintain its operations, taking into account the new conditions. This can be achieved by using the reserve capacity of the system if it is available. To reorganize traffic by using new routes we should have a flexible routing system. The dynamic reconfiguration problem becomes more complicated if Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are taken into account. We consider the so-called Olympic service that provides three tiers of services: gold, silver and bronze with decreasing quality. When the failure occurs, the provider needs to reconfigure the transfer of the network as quickly as possible, attending firstly to the gold customers and once that is done to the silver customers and lastly, if there is any time left, to the bronze customers. We describe various linear programming problems that can be used for dynamical reconfiguration in the presence of SLA. In particular we discuss in detail approaches to reconfiguration with and without penalization.