Time-aware congestion-free routing reconfiguration

A general model is developed to study how network routing can be reconfigured quickly without incurring transient congestion. Assuming both initial and target configurations are congestion-free, it is known that transient congestion may still occur during the reconfiguration process if links contain a mix of traffic flows following old and new routing rules, resulting from variation of switch reaction time and propagation delay differences among paths. We consider these factors by explicitly incorporating timing uncertainty intervals into the model. The model leads to an optimization problem whose solution represents a fast (in terms of actual physical time) congestion-free routing reconfiguration. Our formulation naturally reduces to existing work of finding minimal number of algorithmic update steps when the timing uncertainty intervals are very large, meaning we have little prior knowledge about them. The optimization problem is shown to be a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) with a polynomial-size constraint set, and is proved to be NP-hard. We then further introduce an approximation algorithm with performance guarantee to solve the problem efficiently. Several numerical examples are provided to illustrate our results. In particular, it is demonstrated that timing information can possibly accelerate the update process, even if more steps are involved.