Survivable Cross-Layer Virtual Topology Design Using a Hyper-Heuristic Approach

In optical WDM networks, designing survivable virtual topologies is a critical problem since a fiber failure may result in a serious amount of data loss. We propose a novel hyper-heuristic approach based on ant colony optimization for solving the survivable cross-layer virtual topology design problem efficiently. To increase the scale-up, a flow-deviation method is used. The experimental results show that our approach can solve the problem for single-link failure in a reasonable amount of time, i.e., 20 minutes on average. Moreover, for double-link failure situations, our approach can still be used to design survivable virtual topologies in approximately 30 minutes without any change in the algorithm.