Link and Node Protection using Hamiltonian p-Cycles found by Ant-like Agents

Protection cycles is a well know dependability measure and commonly applied in SDH networks with ring topologies. Applying protection cycles (known as p-cycles) in meshed network has recently been shown to provide good protection against failures in both network links and nodes. Upcoming optical burst and packet switched networks will require node protection. Increasing the density of meshing in such networks and applying p-cycle protection may prove more cost efficient than traditional protection by standby node redundancy. Swarm intelligence is a distributed system construction concept which has shown promising results when applied to problems within the area of network and operational management. Swarm Intelligence systems are fully distributed (without central components) have high redundancy, are adaptable, and can find near optimal solutions to NP-hard problems. This paper describes a new swarm intelligence system based on the CE-ant algorithm developed by Helvik and Wittner. The system is capable of finding near optimal Hamiltonian cycles in meshed networks with respect to the amount of spare capacity on the links in the cycle. Early results from simulations indicate that the new system has a promising ability to find good candidate p-cycles.