An efficient approach to real-time traffic routeing for telephone network management

When contingencies occur in the telephone network the proper traffic control actions for rearranging the traffic flow must be promptly taken in a short period of time, othewise, the congestion will soon spread to other parts of the network. In this paper, a multicommodity maximal flow model is proposed to formulate the problem, and an efficient approach is proposed to find the solution within a short time period. The node pairs are first sorted by the traffic demand into decreasing order and the capacity of links is allocated to the node pair with largest demand. The traffic allocation is then iteratively reallocated on those routes which share the same links to find a better solution, until that solution is obtained. The advantages of this approach are: (1) a feasible solution can be obtained within a short time period; (2) the affected traffic can be rerouted on paths with more than two links; (3) an acceptable solution can be found once the period has expired.