Effective load balancing in Ethernet rings

Abstract

This paper models a ring loading problem suited for survivable Ethernet rings blocking a link to create a loop-free topology. When a block is given on a link of an Ethernet ring, loading of traffic demands is immediately determined due to the logically formed bus topology. As the traffic load over a ring varies depending on the position of the block, the ring loading problem can be viewed a new optimization problem named the ring block positioning (RBP) problem. Our RBP is grouped into two types: RBPG to minimize the overall ring load and RBPL to minimize the maximum link load. For each RBP, we present an exhaustive search method to check all block cases on a ring and then suggest a more effective ring loading algorithm ensuring the computing time shorter than the exhaustive search. According to our experiments using MATLAB, each effective ring loading method shows computing time about 360 times in RBPG and about four times in RBPL faster than each exhaustive search while finding the optimal block to satisfy the goal of each RBP.