Optimization of Internet Protocol network design and routing

We consider network design and routing for Internet Protocol (IP) traffic. The design problem concerns capacity dimensioning of communication links, where the design cost consists of fixed charges and linear capacity expansion costs. The optimization problem also concerns determining the amount of traffic demand to be carried by the network and the metric used by a shortest path routing protocol. We present a novel linear mixed-integer mathematical formulation and two heuristic solution procedures. The first heuristic uses mixed-integer programming to generate a sequence of routing solutions. The second solution approach is a simulated annealing meta heuristic. Computational experiments for synthesized and real-life networks show that high-quality solutions can be obtained by both approaches.