Is dynamic dedicated path protection tractable?

Abstract

Intractable is the problem of finding two link-disjoint paths of minimal cost if the path cost is limited since it can be a special case of the partition problem. In optical networks, this limit can be introduced by the signal modulation reach. Even without this limit, the existing literature suggested the problem intractable because of the spectrum continuity and contiguity constraints, but we show that the problem can be solved exactly with the recently-proposed generic Dijkstra algorithm over a polynomially-bounded search space, thus proving the problem tractable.