A Ring Selection Problem For SONET

Draft Date: March 18, 2002 _______________________________________________________________________ Abstract. In this research we describe a ring selection problem for ring based telecommunication networks. This Minimum Coverage Connected Rings (MCCR) Problem is formulated as an integer program. Further, we evaluate the complexity of this problem and prove that MCCR is NP-Hard. Since the solution of large instances of MCCR by traditional mathematical programming techniques is difficult, we develop a technique based on constraint addition to solve it. This solution procedure iteratively solves the set-covering problem with additional constraints and stops upon reaching an optimal solution to MCCR. Computational results are presented for a large number of instances of MCCR while various parameter such as the size and cost structure of the data is varied. It is shown that our constraint addition procedure performs reasonably well for a diverse set of problem instances.