Increasing usage of communication networks and quality of service requirements call for efficient management of these high-speed networks. We address the problem of bandwidth allocation planning of communication demands. Shortest path routing is the traditional technique applied to this problem. However, this approach can lead to poor network utilization and even congestion. We show how an abstraction technique combined with systematic search algorithms and heuristics derived from Artificial Intelligence make it possible to solve this problem better and in much tighter networks, from a bandwidth usage point of view. Keywords: QoS-routing, constraint-based routing, resource allocation planning. 1 Introduction The communication networks of the next millennium are expected to offer a wide range of services to an increasingly large number of users, with a diverse range of Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. This calls for efficient control and management of these high-speed networks. ...

We consider off-line versions of path provisioning and path protection problems for general circuit switched networks. Both problems deal with a given network topology and a list of integral demand flows. The objective is to route the flows and to allocate the bandwidth in a way that minimizes the total amount of bandwidth used for working and protection paths. We consider path-based protection where, in case of a single link failure, all the flows utilizing the failed link can be rerouted to a precomputed set of paths. We demonstrate that flow splitting can bring significant advantages for both provisioning and protection problems. Since the problem is NP-complete, we propose and analyze two simple heuristics. We show that one of these heuristics performs almost as well as the optimal solution.