Abstract
Flow thinning (FT) is a traffic routing and protection strategy for communication networks whose links experience fluctuations in available capacity (as, e.g., in wireless networks). To cope with this phenomenon, end-to-end traffic demands are assigned dedicated tunnels (e.g., MPLS tunnels) whose nominal capacity is subject to thinning in order to account for variable capacity of the links, fluctuating below their nominal values. Consequently, the instantaneous traffic sent between the demand's end nodes must accommodate to the current total capacity available on its dedicated tunnels. In the paper we present a path generation-based approach to network dimensioning for a practical version of FT applying affine flow thinninga fairly complicated issue not yet considered. We derive a relevant pricing problem and present a numerical study illustrating efficiency of the optimization algorithm.