Inverse Shortest Path Routing Problems in the Design of IP Networks

Abstract: This thesis is concerned with problems related to shortest pathrouting (SPR) in Internet protocol (IP) networks. In IP routing, alldata traffic is routed in accordance with an SPR protocol, e.g. OSPF.That is, the routing paths are shortest paths w.r.t. some artificialmetric. This implies that the majority of the Internet traffic isdirected by SPR. Since the Internet is steadily growing, efficientutilization of its resources is of major importance. In theoperational planning phase the objective is to utilize the availableresources as efficiently as possible without changing the actualdesign. That is, only by re-configuration of the routing. This isreferred to as traffic engineering (TE). In this thesis, TE in IPnetworks and related problems are approached by integer linearprogramming.Most TE problems are closely related to multicommodity routingproblems and they are regularly solved by integer programmingtechniques. However, TE in IP networks has not been studied as much,and is in fact a lot harder than ordinary TE problems without IProuting since the complicating shortest path aspect has to be takeninto account. In a TE problem in an IP network the routing isperformed in accordance with an SPR protocol that depends on a metric,the so called set of administrative weights. The major differencebetween ordinary TE problems and TE in IP networks is that all routingpaths must be simultaneously realizable as shortest paths w.r.t. thismetric. This restriction implies that the set of feasible routingpatterns is significantly reduced and that the only means available toadjust and control the routing is indirectly, via the administrativeweights.A constraint generation method for solving TE problems in IP networksis outlined in this thesis. Given an "original" TE problem, the ideais to iteratively generate and augment valid inequalities that handlethe SPR aspect of IP networks. These valid inequalities are derived byanalyzing the inverse SPR problem. The inverse SPR problem is todecide if a set of tentative routing patterns is simultaneouslyrealizable as shortest paths w.r.t. some metric. When this is not thecase, an SPR conflict exists which must be prohibited by a validinequality that is then augmented to the original TE problem. Toderive strong valid inequalities that prohibit SPR conflicts, athorough analysis of the inverse SPR problem is first performed. Inthe end, this allows us to draw conclusions for the design problem,which was the initial primary concern.