Toward Scalable Algorithms for the Unsplittable Shortest Path Routing Problem

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the Delay Constrained Unsplittable Shortest Path Routing problem which arises in the field of traffic engineering for IP networks. This problem consists, given a directed graph and a set of commodities, to compute a set of routing paths and the associated administrative weights such that each commodity is routed along the unique shortest path between its origin and its destination, according to these weights. We present a compact MILP formulation for the problem, extending the work in (A. Bley, 2010) along with some valid inequalities to strengthen its linear relaxation. This formulation is used as the bulding block of an iterative approach that we develop to tackle large scale instances. We further propose a dynamic programming algorithm based on a tree decomposition of the graph. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first exact combinatorial algorithm for the problem. Finally, we assess the efficiency of our approaches through a set of experiments on state-of-the-art instances.